I stared at the sea. The words fell out of my mouth like ashes. ‘She tried to run. Alone. Josef was already fucked in the head with the faith, he wouldn’t help her. So she took her daughter’s body, alone, and stole a skimmer. Went east along the coast, looking for a channel she could cut through to get her south to Millsport. They hunted her down and brought her back. Josef helped them. They took her to a punishment chair the priests had built in the centre of the village and they made her watch while they cut the stack from her daughter’s spine and took it away. Then they did the same thing to her. While she was conscious. So she could appreciate her own salvation.’
I swallowed. It hurt to do it. Around us, the tourist crowd ebbed and flowed like the multicoloured idiot tide it was.
‘Afterwards, the whole village celebrated the freeing of their souls. New Revelation doctrine says a cortical stack must be melted to slag, to cast out the demon it contains. But they’ve got some superstitions of their own up on the North arm. They take the stacks out in a two-man boat, sealed in sonar reflective plastic. They sail fifty kilometres out to sea and somewhere along the way, the officiating priest drops the stacks overboard. He has no knowledge of the ship’s course, and the helmsman’s forbidden to know when the stacks have been dropped.’
‘That sounds like a pretty easily corrupted system.’
‘Maybe. But not in this case. I tortured both of them until they died, and they couldn’t tell me. I’d have a better chance of finding Sarah’s stack if Hirata’s Reef had fucking tipped over on top of it.’
I felt her gaze on me and, finally, turned to face it.
‘So you’ve been there,’ she murmured.
I nodded. ‘Two years ago. I went to find her when I got back from Latimer. I found Josef instead, snivelling by her grave. I got the story out of him.’ My face twitched with the memory. ‘Eventually. He gave up the names of the helmsman and the officiator, so I tracked them down next. Like I said, they couldn’t tell me anything useful.’
‘And then?’
‘And then I went back to the village and I killed the rest of them.’
She shook her head slightly. ‘The rest of who?’
‘The rest of the village. Every motherfucker I could find who was an adult there the day she died. I got a datarat in Millsport to run population files for me, names and faces. Everyone who could have lifted a finger to help her and didn’t. I took the list and I went back up there and I slaughtered them.’ I looked at my hands. ‘And a few others who got in my way.’
She was staring at me as if she didn’t know me. I made an irritable gesture.
‘Oh, come on, Virginia. We’ve both done worse than that on more worlds than I can remember right now.’
‘You’ve got Envoy recall,’ she said numbly.
I gestured again. ‘Figure of speech. On seventeen worlds and five moons. And that habitat in the Nevsky Scatter. And—’
‘You took their stacks?’
‘Josef and the priests’, yes.’
‘You destroyed them?’
‘Why would I do that? It’s exactly what they’d want. Oblivion after death. Not to come back.’ I hesitated. But it seemed pointless to stop now. And if I couldn’t trust Vidaura, then there was no one else left. I cleared my throat and jabbed a thumb northward. ‘Back that way, out on the Weed Expanse, I’ve got a friend in the haiduci. Among other business ventures, he breeds swamp panthers for the fight pits. Sometimes, if they’re good, he fits them with cortical stacks. That way, he can download injured winners into fresh sleeves and tip the odds.’
‘I think I see where this is going.’
‘Yeah. For a fee, he takes the stacks I give him, and loads their owners into some of his more over-the-hill panthers. We give them time to get used to the idea, then put them into the low-grade pits and see what happens. This friend can make good money running matches where it’s known humans have been downloaded into the panthers; there’s some kind of sick subculture built around it in fight circles apparently.’ I tipped my coffee canister and examined the dregs in the bottom. ‘I imagine they’re pretty much insane by now. Can’t be much fun being locked inside the mind of something that alien in the first place, let alone when you’re fighting tooth and nail for your life in a mud pit. I doubt there’s much conscious human mind left.’
Vidaura looked down into her lap. ‘Is that what you tell yourself?’
‘No, it’s just a theory.’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is some conscious mind left. Maybe there’s a lot left. Maybe in their more lucid moments they think they’ve gone to hell. Either way suits me.’
‘How are you financing this?’ she whispered.
I found a bared-teeth grin from somewhere and put it on. ‘Well, contrary to popular belief, some parts of what happened on Sanction IV worked out quite well for me. I’m not short of funds.’
She looked up, face tightening towards anger. ‘You made money out of Sanction IV?’
‘Nothing I didn’t earn,’ I said quietly.
Her features smoothed somewhat as she backed the anger up. But her voice still came out taut. ‘And are these funds going to be enough?’
‘Enough for what?’
‘Well,’ she frowned. ‘To finish this vendetta. You’re hunting down the priests from the village but—’
‘No, I did that last year. It didn’t take me very long, there weren’t that many. Currently, I’m hunting down the ones who were serving members of the Ecclesiastical Mastery when she was murdered. The ones who wrote the rules that killed her. That’s taking me longer, there are a lot of them, and they’re more senior. Better protected.’
‘But you’re not planning to stop with them?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not planning to stop at all, Virginia. They can’t give her back to me, can they? So why would I stop?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I don’t know how much Virginia told the others once we got back inside the cranked up virtuality. I stayed down in the mapping construct while the rest of them adjourned to the hotel-suite section, which somehow I couldn’t help thinking of as upstairs. I don’t know what she told them, and I didn’t much care. Mostly, it was a relief just to have let someone else in on the whole story.
Not to be the only one.
People like Isa and Plex knew fragments, of course, and Radul Segesvar somewhat more. But for the rest, the New Revelation had hidden what I was doing to them from the start. They didn’t want the bad publicity or the interference of infidel powers like the First Families. The deaths were passed off as accidents, monastery burglaries gone wrong, unfortunate petty muggings. Meanwhile, the word from Isa was that there were private contracts out on me at the Mastery’s behest. The priesthood had a militant wing, but they obviously didn’t place too much faith in it because they’d also seen fit to engage a handful of Millsport sneak assassins. One night in a small town on the Saffron Archipelago, I let one of them get close enough to test the calibre of the hired help. It wasn’t impressive.
I don’t know how much Virginia Vidaura told her surfer colleagues, but the presence of the priest in Kem Point alone made it very clear that we could not return from a raid on Rila Crags and stay on the Strip. If the New Revelation could track me this far, so could others far more competent.
As a sanctuary, Vchira Beach was blown.
Mario Ado voiced what was probably a general feeling.
‘You’ve fucked this up, dragging your personal crabshit into the harbour with you. You find us a solution.’