While my ears are ringing, and I'm fumbling the next magazine into place, Sam kicks the door in and quickly shoots the police zombie slumped against the side of the corridor in the head. (That one was still moving, hand creeping toward the shotgun lying in the floor; the two bodies behind it aren't even twitching.) Seeing how efficiently Sam steps in gives me a momentary chill of recognition. No hesitation. Behind us, Liz is still moaning, and Martin won't be good for anything. "What is this place?" I ask aloud.
"More offices." Sam kicks a door open and duck-walks through it. "Modern offices." I follow him. The next door is more substantial, opening onto a glass-fronted balcony above a room with open floor space, an office-sized assembler at one side, and a row of glassy doors . . . "Is that what I think it is?"
Bingo. "Gates," I say. "A switch hub. How do we get down—"
"Hello, Reeve," says my earpiece, in a voice that sets my teeth on edge. "This isn't going to work, you know."
Where did Fiore get a headset from? Greg? Or have they captured one of Team Green?
Sam looks as if someone's poleaxed him. His jaw is literally gaping. Too late I realize he's on the same chatline.
"You've lost, Reeve," Fiore adds conversationally. I can hear noises in the background. "We know about your plot. There are guards outside the switch chamber, and if you get past them and make it to the longjump pod, you'll die—there's an active laser fence in there. I'm most disappointed in you, but we can still work something out if you put down your popguns and surrender."
I touch my index finger to my lips and wait until Sam nods at me, to show he's got the message. Then I walk toward the door onto the staircase leading down into the switch chamber and its bank of shortjump gates.
I don't want Sam to see how sick I feel.
"You don't know shit, Fiore," I say lightly.
"Yes I do." He sounds smug. "Greg's unfortunate death makes further concealment irrelevant. Bluntly, you've failed. You can't—"
I rip my earbud out and throw it away, frantically miming at Sam to do likewise. He pulls it out of his ear and stares at it. As he's about to toss it there's a dual bang. He doubles over as a thin reddish mist sprays from his left finger and thumb, retching with pain.
"Sam!" I yell at him. He cradles his damaged hand, panting. "Sam! We've only got a few seconds! Fiore can't stop us, or he'd already be up here! Sanni's got him pinned down! We've got to blow the longjump pod before he gets away! Give me your jacket!"
"No choice—" He takes a shuddering breath and shakes his head. "Reeve."
I place my gun at my feet and take him by the shoulders. "What is it, love?"
A moment of awful tenderness, as I see the pain in his eyes. "I'm sorry," he says brokenly. "I couldn't be what you wanted."
"What—"
And his good fist, still wrapped around the butt of his gun, whacks me across the back of my head, propelling me straight into a pit of darkness from which I only emerge when it's far too late.
TO cut a long story short, we won.
IT feels very different when you watch a replay of a body tumbling off a cliff, in free fall toward the harsh ground so far below, and it's not your body, and there are no second chances.
In the years since Sanni and I—and the rest of our ragtag resistance network—kicked the door shut and overturned Yourdon's pocket dictatorship, I've watched the video take of Sam's death many times. How he sapped me, then gently laid me out on the floor, grunting with effort as he rolled me into the recovery position so I wouldn't choke on my own vomit. How he straightened up painfully afterward and put his gun down. How he walked along the row of shortjump doors, looking for the one opening on the short metal corridor with the handrail and the ring of support nodes halfway along it. How he paused, and went back to move me so that I wasn't lined up with it. And then how he stepped through.
What does it take to step into a corridor, knowing that your enemy said there's a laser fence halfway along it? And as if that isn't enough, to do so wearing a waistcoat with ten kilos of plastic explosives weighing down its pockets?
Sam gets halfway along the corridor. There's a momentary flash, then the door bulges and turns black as the T-gate does a scram shutdown and ejects its wormhole endpoint through the side of the pod. It's not very dramatic.
And that's how we reach the foot of the cliff.
While I was unconscious, Janis and her team did what was expected of them. I think that she was expecting betrayal all along, because she had a few surprises of her own. Yourdon, at the front of the hall, chopped her in half with his Vorpal blade: I can only imagine his shock when another Janis stepped out from behind the fire escape and blew a hole through his chest. I should have realized she was playing a tricky game—her excuse about taking all night to run off ten kilos of high explosives was far too convenient—but in hindsight, she didn't trust anyone by that point. Even me.
While I was unconscious, Fiore—desperate, trapped in the police station down the road by a squad of murderous Sannis—patched through his netlink and got onto our command circuit which was, as expected, compromised by design. But Sanni was one jump ahead of him all the way. Greg had told him what was going on that morning. Fiore thought that a laser fence and extra security guards would suffice. These psywar types, they don't think like a tank, or a fighting cat. Two of me—despite being seriously pissed at Sanni for making them live in the library attic and stay away from Sam—took him out with a rocket-propelled grenade, while three other squads fanned out and combed the parish churches for cowering revenants. As Janis later explained, "When the only soldier you can rely on is Reeve, you make the most of her." But I won't bear a grudge, even though two of me died.
Because when the dust stopped raining down on the cowering cohorts in the auditorium, while our other instances raced through the administration block and the hospital, frantically hunting down assemblers and deleting their pattern buffers before another Yourdon or Fiore could ooze out of them, it was Janis who stepped up to the lectern and fired a shot into the ceiling and called for silence.
"Friends," she said, a faint tremor in her voice. "Friends. The experiment is over. The prison is closed.
"Welcome back to the real world."
THAT all happened years ago. The river of history waits for nobody. We live our lives in the wake of vast events, accommodating ourselves to their shapes. Even those of us who contributed to the events in question.
Maybe the oddest thing is how little has changed since we over-threw the scorefile dictatorship. We still have regular town meetings. We still live in small family groups, as orthohumans. Many of us even stayed with the spousal units we were assigned by Fiore or Yourdon. We dress like it's still the dark ages, and we hold jobs just like before, and we even have babies the primitive way. Sometimes.
But . . .
We vote in the town meetings. There are no scorefile metrics with hidden point tables that some smug researcher can tweak in order to make the parishioners jump. We don't dance like puppets for anyone, even our elected mayor. We may live in families as orthohumans, but we've got an assembler in every home. Mostly we don't want to be neomorphs. Many of us spent too much time as living weapons during the war. We do have—and enthusiastically use—modern medical technology, with A-gates everywhere. The costumery and lifestyle upholstery is harder to explain, but I put it down to social inertia. I saw a blue hermaphrodite centaur in a chain-mail hauberk and no pants in the shopping mall the other day, and guess what? Nobody raised an eyebrow. We're a tolerant town these days. We have to be: There's nowhere else to go until we arrive wherever the Harvest Lore is carrying us.