If the semi-mythical nature of her twenty-five-year existence as a fugitive had been difficult for the security forces to get to grips with, Nadia Makita’s return was worse. She was fifty-three years old but sleeved in new flesh, impossible even for intimate acquaintances to identify. She stalked through the ruins of the previous revolution like a vengeful ghost and her first victims were the backbiters and betrayers from within the ranks of the old alliance. This time, there would be no factional squabbles to diffract the focus, hamstring the Quellist lead and sell her out to the Harlanites.
The neoMaoists, the Communitarians, the New Sun Path, the Parliament Gradualists and the Social Libertarians. She sought them out as they sat in their dotage, muttering over their respective fumbled grabs at power, and she slaughtered them all.
By the time she turned on the First Families and their tame assembly, it was no longer a revolution.
It was the Unsettlement.
It was a war.
Three years, and the final assault on Millsport.
I tabbed the second coffee and drank it while Dig 301 read the story to its close. As a kid, I’d heard it countless times and always hoped each telling for a last minute reversal, a reprieve from the inevitable tragedy.
“With Millsport firmly in the hands of government forces, the Quellist assault broken and a moderate compromise being brokered in the assembly,
Makita perhaps believed that her enemies would have other more pressing matters to attend to before hunting her down. She had above all believed in their love of expediency, but faulty intelligence led her to misjudge the vital role her own capture or elimination had to play in the peace accord. By the time the error was realised, flight was all but impossible …”
Scratch the ‘all but’. Harlan sent more warships to ring the Alabardos Crater than had been deployed in any single naval engagement of the war.
Crack helicopter pilots flew their craft at the upper edges of the four-hundred-metre limit with semi-suicidal brinkmanship. Spec ops snipers crammed inside, armed with weapons as heavy as it was thought the orbitals’ parameters would permit. Orders were to bring down any escaping aircraft by all and any means including, if necessary, mid-air collision.
“In a final, desperate attempt to save her, Makita’s followers risked a high-level flight in a stripped-down jetcopter which it was believed the orbital platforms might ignore. However—”
“Yeah, okay, Dig. That’ll do.” I drained my coffee. However, they fucked up. However, the plan was flawed (or possibly a deliberate betrayal). However, a lance of angelfire lashed down from the sky over Alabardos and carved the jetcopter into a flash-burnt mid-air image of itself. However, Nadia Makita floated gently down to the ocean as randomised organic molecules amongst metallic ash. I didn’t need to hear it again. “What about the escape legends?”
“As with all heroic figures, legends about Quellcrist Falconer’s secret escape from real death are rife.” Dig 301’s voice seemed faintly tinged with reproach, but that might have been my groggy imagination. “There are those who believe she never entered the jetcopter in the first place and that later she slipped away from Alabardos disguised among the occupying ground troops. More credible theories derive from the idea that at some point before her death, Falconer’s consciousness was backed up and that she was revived once the post-war hysteria had died down.”
I nodded. “So where would they have stored her?”
“Beliefs vary.” The construct raised one elegant hand and extended slim fingers in sequence. “Some claim she was needlecast offworld, either to a deep-space datavault—”
“Oh yeah, that’s likely.”
“—or to another of the Settled Worlds where she had friends. Adoracion and Nkrumah’s Land are the favourites. Another theory suggests that she was stored after sustaining a combat injury in New Hokkaido from which she was expected to die. That when she recovered, her followers abandoned or forgot the copy—”
“Yep. As you would with your honoured hero-leader’s consciousness.”
Dig 301 frowned at the interruption. “The theory presupposes widespread, chaotic fighting, extensive sudden deaths and a breakdown of overall communication. Such salients did occur at various stages in the New Hokkaido campaigns.”
“Hmm.”
“Millsport is another theorised location. Historians of the period have argued that the Makita family was sufficiently elevated among the middle class to have had access to discreet storage facilities. Many data brokerage firms have successfully fought legal battles to maintain the anonymity of such stacks. The total discreet storage capacity in the Millsport metropolitan zone is estimated at over—”
“So which theory do you believe?”
The construct stopped so abruptly her mouth stayed open. A ripple blinked through the projected presence. Tiny machine-code specs shimmered briefly into existence at her right hip, left breast and across her eyes.
Her voice took the flattened tone of rote.
“I am a Harkany Datasystems service construct, enabled at basic interactional level. I cannot answer that question.”
“No beliefs, huh?”
“I perceive only data and the probability gradients it provides.”
“Sounds good to me. Do the math. What’s the majority probability here?”
“The highest likelihood outcome from the data available is that Nadia Makita was aboard the Quellist jetcopter at Alabardos, was vaporised with it by orbital fire and no longer exists.”
I nodded again and sighed.
“Right.”
Sylvie came back a couple of hours later, carrying fresh fruit and a hotbox full of spiced shrimpcakes. We ate without talking much.
“Did you get through?” I asked her at one point.
“No.” She shook her head, chewing. “There’s something wrong. I can feel it. I can feel them out there, but I can’t pin down enough for a transmission link.”
Her eyes lowered, creased in a frown that looked like pain.
“There’s something wrong,” she repeated quietly.
“You didn’t take the scarf off, did you?”
She looked at me. “No. I didn’t take the scarf off. That doesn’t affect functionality, Micky. It just pisses me off.”
I shrugged. “You and me both.”
Her eyes tracked to the pocket where I habitually kept the excised cortical stacks, but she said nothing.
We stayed out of each other’s way for the rest of the day. Sylvie sat at the datacoil most of the time, periodically inducing shifts in the coloured display without touching it or speaking. At one point, she went into her bedroom and lay on the automould for an hour, staring at the ceiling.
Glancing in on my way past to the bathroom, I saw her lips moving silently. I took a shower, stood by the window, ate fruit and drank coffee I didn’t want. Eventually I went outside and wandered around the margins of the eyrie’s base, talking desultorily to Dig 301 who, for some reason, had taken it upon herself to tag along. Maybe she was there to make sure I didn’t deface anything.
An undefined tension sat in the cold mountain air. Like sex unperformed, like bad weather coming in.
We can’t stay like this forever, I knew. Something has to give.
But instead it got dark and after another monosyllabic meal, we went to our separate beds early. I lay in the deadened quiet of the cabin’s soundproofing, imagining night sounds that mostly belonged to a climate much further south. It hit me suddenly that I should have been there nearly two months back. Envoy conditioning—focus on your immediate surroundings and cope—had kept me from thinking about it much over the past several weeks, but whenever I had time my mind slipped back to Newpest and the Weed Expanse. It wasn’t like anyone would be missing me exactly, but appointments had been made and now broken, and Radul Segesvar would be wondering if my silent disappearance might in fact signify detection and capture, with all the associated grief that could bring home to him on the Expanse. Segesvar owed me, but it was a debt of arguable worth and with the southern mafias, it doesn’t do to push that angle too hard. The haiduci don’t have the ethical discipline of the yakuza. And at a couple of months silently overdue, I was pushing it to the limit.