FORTY-NINE

Afterwards, it took me a while to realise I wasn’t dreaming again. There was the same hallucinatory, abandoned quality to the scene around me as the childhood nightmare I’d relived after the stunblast, the same lack of coherent sense. I was lying on the dock at Segesvar’s farm again, but it was deserted and my hands were suddenly unbound. A faint mist lay over everything, and the colours seemed bleached out of the surroundings.

The grav sled stood patiently floating where it had been, but with twisted dream-logic, it was Virginia Vidaura who now lay on it, face pallid on either side of the massive bruise across her features. A few metres out into the Expanse, patches of water were inexplicably burning with pale flames.

Sylvie Oshima sat watching them, hunched forward on one of the mooring posts like a ripwing and frozen in place. She must have heard me stumbling as I got up, but she didn’t move or look round.

It had stopped raining, finally. The air smelt scorched.

I walked unsteadily to the water’s edge and stood beside her.

“Grigori fucking Ishii,” she said, still without looking at me.

“Sylvie?”

Then she turned, and I saw the confirmation. The deCom command head was back. The detail of how she held herself, the look in her eyes, the voice had all shifted back. She smiled wanly.

“This is all your fault, Micky. You gave me Ishii to think about. I couldn’t leave it alone. Then I remembered who he was, and I had to go back down there and look for him. And dig through the paths he came in on, the paths she came in on too once I started looking.” She shrugged, but it wasn’t an easy gesture. “I opened the way.”

“You’re losing me. Who is Grigori Ishii?”

“You really don’t remember? Kid’s history class, year three? The Alabardos Crater?”

“My head hurts, Sylvie, and I cut a lot of school. Get to the point.”

“Grigori Ishii was a Quellist jetcopter pilot with the fall-back detachment at Alabardos. The one who tried to fly Quell out. He died with her when the angelfire cut loose.”

“Then…”

“Yeah.” She laughed, barely, a single small sound. “She is who she says she is.”

“Did?” I stopped and looked around me, trying to encompass the enormity of it. “Did she do this?”

“No, I did.” A shrugged correction. “They did, I asked them to.”

“You called down the angelfire? You hotwired an orbital?”

A smile drifted across her face, but it seemed to catch on something painful as it passed. “Yeah. All that crabshit we used to talk, and I’m really the one that swings it. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?”

I pressed a hand hard against my face. “Sylvie, you’re going to have to slow down. What happened to Ishii’s jetcopter?”

“Nothing. I mean, everything, exactly what you read about in school. The angelfire got it, just like they tell you when you’re a kid. Just like the story.” She was talking more to herself than to me, still staring away into the mist the orbital strike had created when it vaporised Impaler and the four metres of water beneath. “It’s not the way we thought, Micky. The angelfire. It’s a blast beam, but it’s more than that. It’s a recording device too. A recording angel. It destroys everything it touches, but everything it touches has a modifying effect on the energy in the beam as well. Every single molecule, every single subatomic particle changes the beam’s energy state fractionally, and when it’s done, it carries a perfect image of whatever it’s destroyed. And it stores the images afterwards. Nothing’s ever lost.”

I coughed, laughter and disbelief. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re telling me Quellcrist Falconer has spent the last three hundred years inside a fucking Martian database?”

“She was lost at first,” she murmured. “She wandered for such a long time among the wings. She didn’t understand what had happened to her. She didn’t know she’d been transcribed. She had to be so fucking strong.”

I tried to imagine what that might be like, a virtual existence in a system built by alien minds, and couldn’t. It made my skin crawl.

“So how did she get out?”

Sylvie looked at me with a curious gleam in her eyes. “The orbital sent her.”

“Oh, please.”

“No, it’s.” She shook her head. “I don’t pretend to understand the protocols, only what happened. It saw something in me, or in the combination of me and the command software, maybe. Some kind of analogy, something it thought it understood. I was the perfect template for this consciousness, apparently. I think the whole orbital net is an integrated system, and I think it’s been trying to do this for some time. All that modified mimint behaviour in New Hok. I think the system’s been trying to download the human personalities it has stored, all the people the orbitals have burnt out of the sky over the past four centuries, or whatever’s left of them. Up to now, it’s been cramming them into mimint minds. Poor Grigori Ishii—he was part of the scorpion gun we took down.”

“Yeah, you said you knew it. When you were delirious in Drava.”

“Not me. She knew it, she recognised something about him. I don’t think there was much left of Ishii’s personality.” She shivered. “There’s certainly not much left of him down in the holding cells, it’s a shell at best by now, and it’s not sane. But something tripped her memories of him and she flooded the system trying to get out and deal with it. It’s why the engagement fell apart. I couldn’t cope, she came storming up out of the deep capacity like a fucking bomb blast.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to assimilate.

“But why would the orbitals do that? Why start downloading?”

“I told you, I don’t know. Maybe they don’t know what to do with human personality forms. It can’t be what they were designed for. Maybe they put up with it for a century or so, and then started looking for a place to put the garbage. The mimints have had New Hok to themselves for the last three hundred years, that’s most of our whole history here. Maybe this has been going on all the time, there’s no reason we’d know about it before the Mecsek Initiative.”

I wondered distantly how many people had lost their lives to the angel fire over the four hundred years since Harlan’s World was settled. Accidental victims of pilot error, political prisoners cut loose on grav harnesses from Rila Crags and a dozen other such execution spots around the globe, the few odd deaths where the orbitals had acted out of character and destroyed outwith their normal parameters. I wondered how many dissolved into screaming insanity inside the Martian orbital databases, how many more went the same way as they were stuffed unceremoniously into mimint minds in New Hok. I wondered how many were left.

Pilot error?

“Sylvie?”

“What?” She’d gone back to staring out over the Expanse.

“Were you aware when we pulled you out of Rila? Did you know what was going on around you?”

“Millsport? Not really. Some of it. Why?”

“There was a firelight with a swoopcopter, and the orbitals got it. I thought at the time the pilot miscalculated his rate of rise or something, or the orbitals were twitchy from the fireworks. But you would have died if he’d kept strafing us. You think …?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s not a reliable link.” She gestured around her and laughed, a little unsteadily. “I can’t do this sort of thing at will, you know. Like I said, I had to ask nicely.”

Todor Murakami, vaporised. Tomaselli and Liebeck, Vlad/Mallory and his whole crew, the entire armoured body of the lmpaler and the hundreds of cubic metres of water she floated on, even—I looked at my wrists and saw a tiny burn on each—the bioweld cuffs from my and Virginia’s hands.

All gone in the microsecond unleashing of a minutely controlled wrath from the sky.

I thought about the precision of understanding necessary for a machine to achieve all that from five hundred kilometres above the surface of the planet, the idea that there could be an afterlife and its guardians circling up there, and then I remembered the tidy little bedroom in the virtuality, the Renouncer tract peeling away at one corner from the back of the door. I looked at Sylvie again and I understood some of what must be happening inside her.