From Darkest Skies, page 17
‘You think someone like Castilla could blow up a pumping station?’ Patterson asked.
‘Not on purpose.’
‘Loki wasn’t much different. Maybe not quite as stupid, but close.’
So maybe Loki was the bomber, maybe not, but what Patterson was telling me was that someone had held his hand and shown him what to do. What she wasn’t telling me, because she didn’t need to, was that whoever that person was, they were long gone, all trace of them, and thanks to some anonymous shanker on Colony 478, we were never going to know.
‘I think I need a drink.’
‘Not as much as I do.’ Patterson all but bundled me into the pod. ‘Fortunately there’s this swanky hotel I was talking about. Rangesh says it’s the best in the city. They’re both still alive, by the way, him and Zohreya. Apparently all went well.’ She looked me over. ‘You know, you’re getting better, Rause. You don’t look as beaten-up as you did. The nanites are finally kicking in, are they?’
‘I suppose. Look, we have to—’
She raised a hand. ‘Keon, take a break. At least until tomorrow.’
‘I’m not sure I know how.’
That got a laugh out of her. ‘When we’re young and stupid we think we’ll live for ever, don’t we? The world feels so huge and full of opportunity. A child, a career, a partner, and then all that changes. Chances we used to take for granted become oases in an endless fucking desert. I don’t want to be here, Rause. I want to be at home with Jamie where I’m supposed to be. But since I am here, I’m going to drink and I’m going to dance, and I might even sing, and at some point I’m probably going to cry, because fuck knows when I’ll be able to do it all again … and, hey, I already got to have some fun, right? So you can come with me or you can not, but don’t you dare take it away from me by talking about work all evening. Tomorrow the mask goes back on; and whenever I do that, I’m always afraid that next time I won’t be able to take it off again. If it helps, in the morning I’ll tell you about the other thing I found in Kaltech’s personnel records.’
The pod pushed through the undercity traffic and fought its way to the surface. It stopped outside the gaudy pink façade of a hotel calling itself the Master of the Orient. A pair of shells came and took our bags. Patterson led the way into the bar.
‘What other thing?’
‘Tomorrow, Rause. I have no idea what you drink,’ she said, ‘so you’re getting a Wet Raspberry. You can thank Rangesh for that. He says it’s good.’ She slumped into an easy chair. ‘Let your hair down for once.’
‘I’m starting to wonder if that would be a such good idea.’
‘Count yourself lucky you still have the luxury of asking.’ Patterson leaned forward. ‘Listen, in the pod on the way to Betleshah’s mansion I said some things that weren’t fair. I guess I wished I could have the purity of your grief, that’s all.’
‘The purity of my grief? What the fuck does that even mean, Patterson?’
She flicked me a nervous smile. ‘Made you swear, Rause. Here’s your Wet Raspberry. I’m having a Fingering.’
This smacked of being the start of one of those evenings that ended up with everyone trying desperately to pretend it hadn’t happened. Then again, there was what Liss had said in New Hope, stuck so deep in my throat that I wanted to vomit. I cast a tentative glance into my Servant but she was still somewhere else. She hadn’t replied to my message about Svernoi.
‘So how did you and Alysha meet, anyway?’ Patterson asked.
‘Academy campus bar.’
‘Her as well? How much of a slut were you back then?’
‘I’d left Disappointment with grand plans to visit all the other worlds. By the time I came back I’d managed six. Earth killed it for me. I guess you forget how there’s so much more there. I came back with a fist-full of debt so I worked evenings in the campus bar, but I had a lot of stories too. People liked me. Now and then they liked me a lot.’ I cocked my head at her and shrugged. ‘Alysha came in sometimes. That was how we met.’
Patterson grunted and sipped her cocktail. ‘So you just picked her up one day, like you did me, is that it?’
‘I liked the look of one of her friends. I crashed and burned. A couple of weeks later she came in with a different friend. Same story. The next time she came in she wagged a finger at me. Told me she didn’t have anyone for me this week, but she’d try and do better next. I knew right then she was mine.’ I hesitated. ‘When you said it was a lucky escape we didn’t have kids …’
Patterson took a long slug and made a disgusted face. ‘Forget it. Shit-mistress of narkland, that’s me. Rangesh came up with that.’ She giggled and knocked back the rest of her drink and ordered another. ‘I thought Jamie was going to be the best thing in the world. I took time off work. I nursed him. Jamal and I … But shit, do you know how dull it is, staring at fluffy cubes with letters on them all day, trying to think of something original to do with them?’
She turned away and wiped a hand across her eyes. ‘It was so fucking good, that’s the thing. You know that feeling? I know you do. What makes you lucky is how you get to keep it. I blew mine to pieces. I guess that’s what I was getting at. Appallingly badly, probably.’
I took a sip of Wet Raspberry. ‘You should probably get some sleep, Laura.’
‘I probably should, but waste the only chance I’ll get for what? Another year? I don’t think so.’
‘Chance of what? It won’t …’
Patterson was staring into space as if looking for something. Courage, perhaps. ‘I fought for my son, Rause. Tooth and claw. I would have flayed Jamal alive. I hired investigators. Do you know what made him give up in the end? I told him I’d set him up for dealing kiddie porn.’ She shook her head and took a long ragged breath. ‘The worst? I’m still proud of that, sometimes. That loathsome vile threat. That was love for you. That’s what love makes us do. It would have been better for Jamie if he’d gone to Earth with Jamal. It would have been better for Jamal and better for me. But there you go.’ She shook her head. ‘Jamal walking out on me was entirely my own doing. I was a good lover and a fucking awesome bureau agent, but I was a shit partner and I’m not much of a mother. There. That’s it.’ She threw up her arms. ‘Come on, then. Judge me. Get it over with!’
‘Alysha was running from something when she got on that train,’ I said. ‘What if she was running from me?’
‘Why the fuck would she do that? I mean, you two were tight, right? You were …’ Laura put down her drink. She leaned across the table, staring into me. ‘But you were good. You two … you were …’
‘As far as I knew. But …’
I couldn’t tell her about the miscarriage. Just couldn’t.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we were. Look, you have a nice evening. I’m going to turn in.’
‘Yeah, you should do that, Rause. Fuck off before we do something stupid. You need to find that friend of hers. Miss Archana Enigma.’
‘I know.’
‘And you really don’t have any idea who that was?’
‘I really don’t.’
Patterson nodded and raised her glass to me. ‘I know what it’s like to have ghosts, Rause.’
Truth, but what Patterson didn’t know was that I’d brought mine back to life, and I was barely out of the lounge before I unlocked my Servant and was begging Liss to come to me. And because she was Liss, not some fickle real person but a simulation of someone we all believed had loved me, she came without question, good to her program. I stumbled through the halls and into a faceless anonymous hotel room that was apparently mine.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘I didn’t meant to hurt you,’ Liss said.
I wished sometimes that she’d fight me. It would have made her more real. ‘Was she pregnant?’ I don’t know why I’d never thought to ask before.
‘There was no body, Keys.’
‘But wouldn’t you know? Wouldn’t you know if she was pregnant before she got on that train?’ I stared at the ceiling. I’d hardly drunk anything, no more than a sip of that stupid cocktail Patterson had come up with, yet the room was spinning. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said again. ‘I never meant to blame you for the miscarriage.’
‘Yes, you did. And you were right.’
‘No.’
‘They offered me desk duties. They offered to look after me until the baby was born. I turned them down. It was my choice to chase a gen pusher into the Squats. It was my choice not to back down. It wasn’t my choice that he kicked me where he did, but it was the sum of many choices that caused my miscarriage, several of them my own and selfish. I wanted to keep my life as I’d made it. I think I was afraid of losing that. And so it was, in part, my fault. You told me those things and you were right.’
‘No.’ No, I wasn’t.
‘Yes, you were.’
‘Then I should never have said them.’
‘That’s true. You really hurt her.’
I wrapped my arms over my face, trying to make the memories of Alysha go away, the look in her eyes, the betrayal, the horror, the way she’d crumpled. I’d taken her limitless strength and made it brittle and then shattered it with a single tirade. I hadn’t even realised it. The first words out of my mouth when I saw her in Mercy after we knew the baby was lost: What the hell were you doing?
‘If it’s any consolation,’ said Liss, ‘she wasn’t late when she died. I have all her Servant records. She was good about tracking her cycle. She wasn’t pregnant.’
‘What sort of shit am I, even asking?’
There was a minibar in the hotel room. I drank most of it. Then I think I cried myself to sleep, half of me thinking of Alysha and all the regrets of one bad day that scarred every memory, the other half thinking of Patterson, downstairs in the bar and doing much the same.
13
Stormy Weather
We got up early, hours before dawn. Liss had gone flitting around the Firstfall archives looking for clues about our mystery search and rescue team. Patterson and I made our way to Disappointment’s mag-lev station, both of us still half drunk. A handful of security shells stood watchful on the platform as we boarded. There were bots scraping graffiti off the walls. go home! go back to india! close the doors! That sort of thing.
A man caught my arm, lurching out of a shadow. Patterson squawked and jumped away as though he was a plague carrier. A security shell came running towards us.
‘Help a fellow human?’
His skin was as dark as Rangesh’s, his face lined and hollow. He was stooped and his eyes were glazed, that not-quite-there look of the gen-head. Whatever transgravity he’d had, it hadn’t taken well. He needed to be in a hospital. I pinged his Servant. He’d come to Magenta eight months ago. Since then … nothing.
The security shell gripped his shoulders and pulled him away. I used my Tesseract codes, overrode its protocols and told it to take him to a hospital, not to a cell. I reckoned that was the best help he could get. On impulse I set up a trace so I could follow what Disappointment did with him.
When he was gone, Patterson handed me a packet of DeTox.
‘How you feeling?’ she asked.
‘Troubled.’ I looked at the station around us, the security shells.
The mag-lev pinged our Servants and the doors hissed open to let us in. Patterson winced. ‘Well I feel like crap. You know that being a good Samaritan only earns you paperwork, right?’
‘Last time I was here was a few days before Alysha died.’ I shivered. ‘It wasn’t like this then.’
We moved into the train lounge. A hostess shell came to offer us tea. Patterson shooed it away.
‘This deal with India is problematic, whatever Rangesh likes to think,’ she said. ‘It’s not that we don’t have the space for their surplus population if they come in healthy, but they don’t. They’re getting shoddy transgravity and we don’t have the capacity to fix it. And then we end up compromising, and it only takes one native-born child to have their treatment delayed because of some resource shortage and everyone throws their hands in the air and declares it the end of the world.’ Patterson shook her head.
‘How was your evening?’ I asked her. ‘Did you drink and dance and sing?’
‘Like a fucking king,’ she said, and for a moment there was a smile before the mask came back down. ‘Would you like to hear about what I found in the Kaltech records now?’
Turned out it was Vismans, Gersh’s assistant. The Kaltech records Rangesh had hacked showed he’d arrived in Settlement 64 nearly a decade ago. For five years he’d done the same job, then all of a sudden a change of staff. He’d picked up a whole pile more assistants. Looked like a big promotion. Which was odd, because as far as I could see Kaltech kept meticulous track of the entry and exit logs of every single one of their employees – except the mysterious Gersh – and Vismans had never left Magenta.
‘Gersh disappears, her assistant gets promotion – that’s what I’m seeing,’ said Patterson.
Vismans had returned to Earth six months back. One of us would have to go and talk to him. I just needed to find a good enough excuse.
We dozed until we reached Firstfall. Turned out that Zohreya and Rangesh and the MSDF tac-teams had spent the night in Nico, diverted there by the storm, which still raged and looked like it was settling in for several days more. They’d got in a couple of hours ahead of us and had everyone from the KRAB ship locked in holding cells waiting for someone to charge them or let them go. I left Patterson to dig into Anja Gersh while I had a long hard look at the authorisation paperwork Flemich had given Zohreya against what she’d actually found on the ship, which wasn’t much.
‘Intent to infringe intellectual property?’ I said as we ran through it together. ‘Flimsy. We’re going to have to get a lawyer to look this over or we let them go.’
‘Yes.’
The KRAB crew were bright, that much I knew from ten years ago. They’d sit tight and demand their legal rights and we’d get nothing. Maybe that was the point, maybe shutting them down was all they wanted, a blocking move and some publicity and nothing more. Everything else being equal I’d have let them go and set up discreet surveillance, but Nikita Svernoi floated like a ghost behind them. I wanted something on him.
I took Rangesh and Zohreya aside. ‘We wait on word from above,’ I said. ‘Until then we do everything by the rules and—’
‘Dude, we never should have been there. We had no right to seize their ship. It’s, like—’
‘We did as we were told, Rangesh, and you need to let it be. Zohreya, I’m going to question them. You two can get on with other things. Rangesh—’
‘The gens that did for Shy. Yeah, man, I know. I’m gone.’ Rangesh gave me a mocking salute, turned and sashayed away.
‘I have paperwork.’ Zohreya started as if to follow him. I caught her arm.
‘It can wait. Five years ago you were in the MSDF, right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You have any contact with Search and Rescue?’
‘I was in orbital reconnaissance. I flew outside the atmosphere mostly. But I know some of them. SAR is based in Firstfall, same as the rest of us. Why?’
I told her what Patterson and I had found out about Settlement 64, the training mission that had vanished into a storm to go with that single entry in the Kaltech log. ‘I need someone to go face to face. Find me an operative who knows something. Everyone’s going to be grounded by this storm, right? So they’ll all be bored and kicking their heels.’
Zohreya hesitated. I could see her thinking, reading the files I’d sent to her Servant, working out for herself what all of it meant. Or might mean.
‘Do we have authorisation, sir?’ she asked.
‘Do you need authorisation, Agent Zohreya?’
‘For an official inquiry on behalf of the Tesseract, I need your sanction to question other government employees.’
We both thought about that for a moment.
‘Alternatively I could take a day off, sir.’
‘Take the chance to visit a few friends? Talk about old times?’
‘Exactly that, sir. It would have to be understood that—’
‘I’m not looking to make any enemies or cause anyone any trouble, so—’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but I must beg to differ. If what you suggest is real then someone went to considerable lengths to hide it. We will be causing trouble, sir.’
We both thought about that for a moment too.
‘Are you comfortable with that, Agent Zohreya?’
‘Yes, sir. I am.’
Under my breath I wished her luck. Liss would tell me until the end of time that the fact that Loki had set off his bomb when he had was an accident, a freak piece of misfortune, that there simply wasn’t a viable logic to any other conclusion, but that was her algorithms talking. The real Alysha would have thought the same as I did: that coincidences like that don’t happen, and if there was no viable logic then that was because we were missing something.
With Rangesh and Zohreya out of the way I looked at the four KRAB detainees. One was a new face. The other three I remembered from ten years ago. I showed them to Liss.
‘Which do I pick?’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to scare them. I’m going to show them how they’re tied to Nikita Svernoi, and then I’m going to make him out to be a mass murderer. I’m going to tell them that the Tesseract might turn a blind eye to what they were clearly planning to do on that ship, but not to conspiracy.’
‘Conspiracy to do what, Keys?’
‘To do whatever it is that Svernoi has up his sleeve!’
‘You might need to be a little more specific than that. When did Svernoi come back to Magenta?’
