‘Maybe. I’d say we’ve got a few more days yet, but in the end it comes down to luck. There was an aerial patrol yesterday evening. We heard them but they didn’t come close enough to spot us, and they can’t fly with anything sophisticated enough to scan for body heat or electronic activity.’
‘Ah – so that much remains the same.’
‘The orbitals?’ I nodded. ‘Yeah, they still run at the same parameters as when you—’
I stopped. Gestured. ‘As they always did.’
Again, the long, evaluative stare. I looked back blandly.
‘Tell me,’ she said finally. ‘How long has it been. Since the Unsettlement, I mean.’
I hesitated. It felt like taking a step over a threshold.
‘Please. I need to know.’
‘About three hundred years, local.’ I gestured again. ‘Three hundred and twenty, near enough.’
I didn’t need Envoy training to read what was behind her eyes.
‘So long,’ she murmured.
This life is like the sea. There’s a three-moon tidal slop running out there and if you let it, it’ll tear you apart from everyone and everything you ever cared about.
Japaridze’s homespun wheelhouse wisdom, but it bit deep. You could be a Seven Per Cent Angel thug, you could be a Harlan family heavyweight. Some things leave the same teethmarks on everyone. You could even be Quellcrist fucking Falconer.
Or not, I reminded myself.
Go easy on her.
‘You didn’t know?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know, I dreamed it. I think I knew it was a long time. I think they told me.’
‘Who told you?’
‘I—’ She stopped. Lifted her hands fractionally off the bed and let them fall. ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember.’
She closed her hands up into loosely curled fists on the bed.
‘Three hundred and twenty years,’ she whispered.
‘Yeah.’
She lay, looking down the barrel of it for a while. Waves tapped at the hull. I found that, despite myself, I’d taken a seat in the armchair.
‘I called you,’ she said suddenly.
‘Yeah. Hurry, hurry. I got the message. Then you stopped calling. Why was that?’
The question seemed to floor her. Her eyes widened, then the gaze fell inward on itself again.
‘I don’t know. I knew.’ She cleared her throat. ‘No, she knew you’d come for me. For her. For us. She told me that.’
I leaned forward in the seat. ‘Sylvie Oshima told you? Where is she?’
‘In here, somewhere. In here.’
The woman in the bunk closed her eyes. For a minute or so I thought she’d gone to sleep. I would have left the cabin, gone back up on deck, but there was nothing up there I wanted. Then, abruptly, her eyes snapped open again and she nodded as if something had just been confirmed in her ear.
‘There’s a.’ She swallowed. ‘A space down there. Like a premillennial prison. Rows of cells. Walkways and corridors. There are things down there she says she caught, like catching bottleback from a charter yacht. Or maybe caught like a disease? It’s, it shades together. Does that make any sense?’
I thought about the command software. I remembered Sylvie Oshima’s words on the crossing to Drava.
—mimint interactive codes trying to replicate themselves, machine intrusion systems, construct personality fronts, transmission flotsam, you name it. I have to be able to contain all that, sort it, use it and not let anything leak through into the net. It’s what I do. Time and time again. And no matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterwards, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces. Ghosts of things. There’s stuff bedded down there, beyond the baffles, that I don’t want to even think about.
I nodded. Wondered what it might take to break out of that kind of prison. What kind of person – or thing – you might have to be.
Ghosts of things.
‘Yeah, it makes sense.’ And then, before I could stop myself. ‘So is that where you come in, Nadia? You something she caught?’
A brief look of horror flitted across the gaunt features.
‘Grigori,’ she whispered. ‘There’s something that sounds like Grigori down there.’
‘Grigori who?’
‘Grigori Ishii.’ It was still a whisper. Then the inward-looking horror was gone, wiped away, and she was staring hard at me. ‘You don’t think I’m real, do you, Micky Serendipity?’
A flicker of unease in the back of my head. The name Grigori Ishii chimed somewhere in the pre-Envoy depths of my memory. I stared back at the woman in the bed.
Go easy on her.
Fuck that.
I stood up. ‘I don’t know what you are. But I’ll tell you this for nothing, you’re not Nadia Makita. Nadia Makita is dead.’
‘Yes,’ she said thinly. ‘I’d rather gathered that. But evidently she was backed up and stored before she died, because here I am.’
I shook my head.
‘No, you’re not. You’re not here at all in any guaranteed sense. Nadia Makita is gone, vaporised. And there’s no evidence that a copy was made. No technical explanation for how a copy could have got into Sylvie Oshima’s command software, even if it did exist. In fact, no evidence that you’re anything other than a faked personality casing.’
‘I think that’s enough, Tak.’ Brasil stepped suddenly into the cabin. His face wasn’t friendly. ‘We can leave it here.’
I swung on him, skinning teeth in a tight grin. ‘That’s your considered medical opinion is it, Jack? Or just a Quellist revolutionary tenet? Truth in small and controlled doses. Nothing the patient won’t be able to handle.’
‘No, Tak,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s a warning. Time for you to come out of the water.’
My hands flexed gently.
‘Don’t try me, Jack.’
‘You’re not the only one with neurachem, Tak.’
The moment hung, then pivoted and died as the ridiculous dynamics of it caught up with me. Sierra Tres was right. It wasn’t this fractured woman’s fault Isa was dead, and nor was it Brasil’s. And besides, any damage I’d wanted to do to the ghost of Nadia Makita was now done. I nodded and dropped the combat tension like a coat. I brushed past Brasil and reached the door behind him. Turned briefly back to the woman in the bunk.
‘Whatever you are, I want Sylvie Oshima back unharmed.’ I jerked my head at Brasil. ‘I brought you these new friends you’ve got, but I’m not one of them. If I think you’ve done anything to damage Oshima, I’ll go through them all like angelfire just to get to you. You keep that in mind.’
She looked steadily back at me.
‘Thank you,’ she said without apparent irony. ‘I will.’
On deck, I found Sierra Tres propped in a steel frame chair, scanning the sky with a pair of binoculars. I came and stood behind her, cranking up the neurachem as I peered out in the same direction. It was a limited view – Boubin Islander was tucked away in the shade of a massive, jagged fragment of toppled Martian architecture that had hit the shoal below us, bedded there and fossilised into the reef over time. Above water, airborne spores had seeded a thick covering of creeper and lichen analogues, and now the view out from under the ruin was obscured by ropes of hanging foliage.
‘See anything?’
‘I think they’ve put up microlights.’ Tres put aside the binoculars. ‘It’s too far away to get more than glints, but there’s something moving out there near the break in the reef. Something very small, though.’
‘Still twitchy, then.’
‘Wouldn’t you be? It’s got to be a hundred years since the First Families lost an aircraft to angelfire.’
‘Well.’ I shrugged with an ease I didn’t really feel. ‘Got to be a hundred years since anyone was stupid enough to start an aerial assault during an orbital storm, right?’