‘So tell me about the Qualgrist Protocol,’ I said after a while. ‘This weapon you sold the yakuza.’
She twitched. Didn’t look at me. ‘You know about that, huh?’
‘I got it out of Plex. But he wasn’t too clear on the detail. You’ve activated something that’s killing Harlan family members, right?’
She stared down at the water for a while.
‘It’s taking a lot for granted,’ she said slowly. ‘Thinking I should trust you with this.’
‘Why? Is it reversible?’
She grew very still.
‘I don’t think so.’ I had to strain to pick out her words in the wind. ‘I let them believe there was a termination code so they’d keep me alive trying to find out what it was. But I don’t think it can be stopped.’
‘So what is it?’
Then she did look at me, and her voice firmed up.
‘It’s a genetic weapon,’ she said clearly. ‘In the Unsettlement, there were volunteer Black Brigade cadres who had their DNA modified to carry it. A gene-level hatred of Harlan family blood, pheromone-triggered. It was cutting-edge technology, out of the Drava research labs. No one was sure if it would work, but the Black Brigades wanted a beyond-the-grave strike if we failed at Millsport. Something that would come back, generation after generation, to haunt the Harlanites. The volunteers, the ones that survived, would pass it on to their children and those children would pass it on to theirs.’
‘Nice.’
‘It was a war, Kovacs. You think the First Families don’t pass on a ruling-class blueprint to their offspring? You think the same privilege and assumption of superiority isn’t imprinted, generation after generation?’
‘Yeah, maybe. But not at a genetic level.’
‘Do you know that for a fact? Do you know what goes on in the First Family clone banks? What technologies they’ve accessed and built into themselves? What provision there is for perpetuating the oligarchy?’
I thought of Mari Ado, and everything she’d rejected on her way to Vchira Beach. I never liked the woman much, but she deserved a better class analysis than this.
‘Suppose you just tell me what this fucking thing does,’ I said flatly.
The woman in Oshima’s sleeve shrugged. ‘I thought I had. Anyone carrying the modified genes has an inbuilt instinct for violence against Harlan family members. It’s like the genetic fear of snakes you see in monkeys, like that built-in response the bottlebacks have to wingshadow on water. The pheromonal make-up that goes with Harlan blood triggers the urge. After that, it’s just a matter of time and personality – in some cases the carrier will react there and then, go berserk and kill with anything to hand. Different personality types might wait and plan it more carefully. Some may even try to resist the urge, but it’s like sex, like competition traits. The biology will win out in the end.’
‘Genetically encoded insurgency.’ I nodded to myself. A dreary kind of calm, descending. ‘Well, I suppose it’s a natural enough extension of the Quellcrist principle. Blow away and hide, come back a lifetime later. If that doesn’t work, co-opt your great-grand-children and they can come back to fight for you several generations down the line. Very committed. How come the Black Brigades never used it?’
‘I don’t know.’ She tugged morosely at the lapel of the jacket Tres had lent her. ‘Not many of us had the access codes. And it’d need a few generations before something like that would be worth triggering. Maybe nobody who knew survived that long. From what your friends have been telling me, most of the Brigade cadres were hunted down and exterminated after I… After it ended. Maybe no one was left.’
I nodded again. ‘Or maybe no one who was left and knew could bring themselves to do it. It’s a pretty fucking horrible idea, after all.’
She shot me a weary look.
‘It was a weapon, Kovacs. All weapons are horrible. You think targeting the Harlan family by blood is any worse than the nuclear blast they used against us at Matsue? Forty-five thousand people vaporised because there were Quellist safe houses in there somewhere. You want to talk about pretty fucking horrible? In New Hokkaido I saw whole towns levelled by flat-trajectory shelling from government forces. Political suspects executed in their hundreds with a blaster bolt through the stack. Is that any less horrible? Is the Qualgrist Protocol any less discriminating than the systems of economic oppression that dictate you’ll rot your feet in the belaweed farms or your lungs in the processing plants, scrabble for purchase on rotten rock and fall to your death trying to harvest ledgefruit, all because you were born poor.’
‘You’re talking about conditions that haven’t existed for three hundred years,’ I said mildly. ‘But that’s not the point. It’s not the Harlan family I feel bad about. It’s the poor fucks whose Black Brigade ancestors decided their political commitment at a cellular level generations before they were even born. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to make my own decisions about who I murder and why.’ I held back a moment, then drove the blade home anyway. ‘And so, from what I’ve read, did Quellcrist Falconer.’
A kilometre of white-capped blue whipped past beneath us. Barely audible, the grav drive in the left-hand pod murmured to itself.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she whispered at last.
I shrugged. ‘You triggered this thing.’
‘It was a Quellist weapon.’ I thought I could hear an edge of desperation in her words. ‘It was all I had to work with. You think it’s worse than a conscript army? Worse than the clone-enhanced combat sleeves the Protectorate decants its soldiers into so they’ll kill without empathy or regret?’
‘No. But I think as a concept it contradicts the words I will not ask you to fight, to live or to die for a cause you have not first understood and embraced of your own free will.’
‘I know that!’ Now it was clearly audible, a jagged flawline running through her voice. ‘Don’t you think I know that? But what choice did I have? I was alone. Hallucinating half the time, dreaming Oshima’s life and…’ She shivered. ‘Other things. I was never sure when I’d next wake up and what I’d find around me when I did, not sure sometimes if I’d wake up again. I didn’t know how much time I had, sometimes, I didn’t even know if I was real. Do you have any idea what that’s like?’
I shook my head. Envoy deployments had put me through a variety of nightmarish experiences, but you never doubt at any moment that it’s absolutely real. The conditioning won’t let you.
Her hands were tight on the gantry rail again, knuckles whitening. She was looking out at the ocean, but I don’t think she could see it.
‘Why go back to war with the Harlan family?’ I asked her gently.
She jerked a glance at me. ‘You think this war ever stopped? You think just because we clawed some concessions from them three hundred years ago, these people ever stopped looking for ways to fuck us back into Settlement-Years poverty again. This isn’t an enemy that goes away.’