FORTY-EIGHT

They brought Sylvie Oshima’s body out of the baling station on a bulky grey grav sled with Tseng markings and a curving plastic shield to keep the rain off. Liebeck steered the sled with a hand-held remote, and another woman I assumed was Tomaselli brought up the rear with a shoulder borne monitor system, also Tseng-logo’d. I’d managed to lever myself to my feet as they came out, and oddly Murakami seemed content to let me stay that way. We stood side by side in silence, like mourners at some premillennial funeral procession, watching the grav bed and its burden arrive. Looking down at Oshima’s face, I remembered the ornate stone garden at the top of Rila Crags, the stretcher there, and it struck me that, for the crucible of a new revolutionary era, this woman was spending a lot of time strapped unconscious to conveyances for invalids. This time, under the transparent cover, her eyes were open but they didn’t seem to be registering anything. If it hadn’t been for the vital signs display on a built in screen beside her head, you could have believed you were looking at a corpse.

You are, Tak. You’re looking at the corpse of the Quellist revolution there. This was all they had, and with Koi and the others gone, there’s no one going to bring it back to life.

It wasn’t really a shock that Murakami had executed Koi, Brasil and Tres, I’d been expecting it at some level from the moment I woke up. I’d seen it in Virginia Vidaura’s face as she slumped against the mooring post; when she spat out the words, it was no more than confirmation. And when Murakami nodded matter-of-factly and showed me the fistful of freshly excised cortical stacks, all I had was the sickening sensation of staring into a mirror at some kind of terminal damage to myself.

“Come on, Tak.” He’d stuffed the stacks back in a pocket of his stealth suit and wiped his hands together dismissively, grimacing. “I had no choice, you can see that. I already told you we can’t afford a rerun of the Unsettlement. Not least because these guys were always going to lose, and then the Protectorate boot comes down, and who wants that?”

Virginia Vidaura spat at him. It was a good effort, considering she was still slumped against the mooring post three or four metres away.

Murakami sighed.

“Just fucking think about it for a moment, will you Virginia? Think what a neoQuellist uprising is going to do to this planet. You think Adoracion was bad? You think Sharya was a mess? That’s nothing to what would have happened here if your beach-party pals had raised the revolutionary standard. Believe me, the Hapeta administration aren’t fucking about here. They’re hardliners with a runaway mandate. They’ll crush anything that looks like a revolt anywhere in the Settled Worlds, and if takes planetary bombardment to suppress it then that is what they’ll use.”

“Yeah,” she snapped. “And that’s what we’re supposed to accept as a model of governance, is it? Corrupt oligarchic overlordship backed up with overwhelming military force.”

Murakami shrugged again. “I don’t see why not. Historically, it works. People like doing what they’re told. And it’s not like this oligarchy is so bad, is it? I mean, look at the conditions people live in. We’re not talking Settlement-Years poverty and oppression any more. That’s three centuries gone.”

“And why is it gone?” Vidaura’s voice had gone faint. I began to worry that she was concussed. Surfer-spec sleeves are tough, but they don’t design them to take the facial damage she’d incurred. “You fucking moron. It’s because the Quellists kicked it in the head.”

Murakami made an exasperated gesture. “Okay, then, so they’ve served their purpose, haven’t they? We don’t need them back again.”

“That’s crabshit, Murakami, and you know it.” But Vidaura was staring emptily at me as she spoke. “Power isn’t a structure, it’s a flow system. It either accumulates at the top or it diffuses through the system. Quellism set that diffusion in motion, and those motherfuckers in Millsport have been trying to reverse the flow ever since. Now it’s accumulative again. Things are just going to go on getting worse, they’ll keep taking away and taking away from the rest of us, and in another hundred years you’re going to wake up and it will be the fucking Settlement Years again.”

Murakami nodded all through the speech, as if he was giving the matter serious thought.

“Yeah, thing is, Virginia,” he said when she’d finished, “they don’t pay me, and they certainly never trained me, to worry about a hundred years from now. They trained me—you trained me, in fact—to deal with present circumstance. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

Present Circumstance: Sylvie Oshima. DeCom.

“Fucking Mecsek,” Murakami said irritably, nodding at the prone figure in the grav bed. “If it was my call, there’s no way local government would have had access to this stuff at all, let alone a mandate to license it out to a bunch of drugged-up bounty-hunter dysfunctionals. We could have had an Envoy specialist team deployed to clean up New Hok, and none of this would ever have happened.”

“Yeah, but it would have cost too much, remember?”

He nodded glumly. “Yeah. Same fucking reason the Protectorate leased the stuff out to everybody in the first place. Percentage return on investment. Everything’s about fucking money. No one wants to make history any more, they just want to make a pile.”

“Thought that was what you wanted,” Virginia Vidaura said faintly. “Everyone scrabbling for cash. Oligarchical caretakers. Piss-easy control system. Now you’re going to fucking complain about it?”

He shot her a weary sideways look and shook his head. Liebeck and Tomaselli wandered off to share a seahemp spliff until Vlad/Mallory showed up with Impaler. Downtime. The grav sled bobbed unattended, a metre from me. Rain fell softly on the transparent plastic covering and trickled down the curve. The wind had dropped to a hesitant breeze and the blasterfire from the far side of the farm had long ago fallen silent. I stood in a crystalline moment of quiet and stared down at Sylvie Oshima’s frozen eyes. Whispering scraps of intuition scratched around at the barriers of my conscious understanding, seeking entry.

“What’s this about making history, Tod?” I asked tonelessly. “What’s going on with deCom?”

He turned to me and there was a look on his face I’d never seen before.

He smiled uncertainly. It made him look very young.

“What’s going on? Like I said before, what’s going on is that it works. They’re getting results back at Latimer, Tak. Contact with the Martian AIs. Datasystem compatibility, for the first time in nearly six hundred years of trying. Their machines are talking to ours, and it’s this system that bridged the gap. We’ve cracked the interface.”

Cold-taloned claws walked briefly up my spine. I remembered Latimer and Sanction IV, and some of the things I’d seen and done there. I think I’d always known it would be pivotal. I just never believed it would come back to claim me.

“Keeping it kind of quiet, aren’t they,” I said mildly.

“Wouldn’t you be?” Murakami stabbed a finger at the supine figure on the grav sled. “What that woman’s got wired into her head will talk to the machines the Martians left behind. In time it might be able to tell us where they’ve gone, it might even lead us to them.” He choked a laugh. “And the joke is she’s not an archaeologue, she’s not a trained Envoy systems officer or a Martian specialist. No. She’s a fucking bounty hunter, Tak, a borderline psychotic mercenary machine-killer. And there are fuck knows how many more like her, all wandering around with this stuff active in their heads. Do you get any sense of how badly the Protectorate has fucked up this time? You were up there in New Hok. Can you imagine the consequences if our first contact with a hyper-advanced alien culture happens through these people? We’ll be lucky if the Martians don’t come back and sterilise every planet we’ve colonised, just to be on the safe side.”