Thirty-Two
THIRTY-TWO
Twelve months ago
An insistent chiming roused Martim from the dead of a drug-induced sleep.
“Shit.” He groaned, rolled over, and jammed a data visor over his bleary eyes, expecting it to be his client summoning him to the office over some urgent issue or asking for something that couldn’t wait.
Uchi insisted on being contacted immediately when it came to anything important to SoCon GasPro, so he had no compunctions about doing the same to others on his team, no matter the hour.
Instead, an urgent message from the front desk of the Oasis Ishaan Hospital appeared in his vision. Director Sandbar Uchi was brought to the emergency room following an attack on his field car. He’s requesting that you come immediately.
Martim bolted upright. He tried to call the hospital back and was routed to a main number that placed him on hold.
Cursing, he ended the call and stumbled into the bathroom, where he threw back two amp tablets, grimacing at the bitter taste as he ground them down and swallowed.
You weren’t supposed to take boosters within four hours of also taking sleepstims, but he couldn’t afford to be slow or groggy at a time like this.
He splashed his face, letting the drugs and the shock of cold water resolve confusion and panic into calm alertness.
Whatever he was going to have to deal with right now, he needed to be at his best, and that included being presentable and prepared.
He shaved, quickly but thoroughly, then dressed as if armoring himself for battle—pressed slacks, white herringbone shirt, charcoal nuwool overcoat, matching wool felt trilby, black lableather gloves, triggersheath.
A quick look in the mirror confirmed that he looked as though he radiated status and authority as Sandbar Uchi’s proxy.
He called a car to take him to the hospital.
It was the dead of night, and the streets were as quiet as they got.
It had been such a good week until tonight.
Months of ceaseless effort that had begun with that emergency meeting in the predawn hours had finally come to triumphant fruition: The Company hearing into the Field 93 tragedy had exonerated Sandbar Uchi completely, concluding that there was no evidence to suggest the catastrophic failure of the airshield was due to negligence or any active malice on the part of the division’s management.
The mood in SoCon GasPro headquarters was exultant.
Birch Yong had thrown a celebratory party and given everyone on the Internal Relations team two days off.
Congratulations poured in from Uchi’s allies.
Martim’s role was to stand in his client’s shadow, but other atiers had been quietly reaching out to commend him on a job well done.
NorCon GasPro’s atier, Condor Anand, had left him a brief but cheerful message: “My boy, you’re a natural.
I couldn’t have managed it any better myself. ”
Martim had allowed himself to relax a little.
He’d even taken his twenty-ninth birthday off work, celebrated it by sleeping for ten hours and buying himself the engraved Moss Lorento belt made of Genebank-sourced certified goat leather that he’d had his eye on for a while.
After his victory, he’d hoped to hear from Isako; even a short note would’ve been nice.
But the escalating war between SatOps and Astrocom was no doubt still consuming all of her attention.
Of course, reaction from the strident big-E crowd had been just as swift—disbelief and condemnation, accusations of a cover-up, and furious calls for action to be taken to deliver justice to the victims.
So it wasn’t a surprise that some unhinged madman had so quickly decided to take matters violently into their own hands.
Martim had been in numerous meetings with Rocco and Thea to discuss the director’s security precautions, which were always hampered by the fact that Uchi refused to allow threats to cancel or delay any of his important tasks or events.
Why hadn’t one of the bodyguards been in contact already?
Martim’s fears revolved around the metric fuckton of work that would fall in his lap if his client was out of commission for a while.
Based on the message from the hospital, Uchi was obviously still alive and lucid enough to be making demands, so Martim wasn’t worried about fate turning him into a ronin anytime soon.
Besides, the director’s synthbody had already been designed and was near completion; if he was critically injured, he could go through emergency recorporalization.
Synthbodies were originally designed to be fail-safes, after all.
The Great Ships had left Earth with two dozen of them in storage as humanity’s insurance against the loss of key officers to accidents, disease, or off-world dangers.
According to historical accounts, many people at the time were still vehemently opposed to full-body neuroprosthetics, describing them as a ghastly perversion of nature and an affront to God.
No one, they said, would want to double their lifespan at such a cost.
Goes to show how little they knew back then.
The hospital came into sight, the glowing emergency sign resolving ominously through the thickness of night.
To Martim’s relief, within minutes of stepping out of the car and entering the building, he spotted Director Uchi standing outside the intensive care unit, looming over a nervous-looking doctor.
“Martim, thank the Mother you’re here in time.
” The director looked uncharacteristically disheveled; he was missing his hat, and the shearling lining of his coat was rumpled and speckled with ashy debris and dark stains.
There was a sealed cut on his forehead that stood out all the more because of the pallor of his face.
“Are you all right, sir?” Martim exclaimed.
“He may have a concussion,” the doctor said. “It would be a good idea to monitor—”
“I’m fine,” Uchi snapped. His eyes were focused, but hard and bright with fury. “Rocco and Thea caught terrorists trying to plant explosives in my field car. One of them set off a bomb. Rocco’s dead.”
Martim blinked in disbelief. He couldn’t say he knew Finch Rocco well, but the man had been such a constant feature in his day-to-day life.
It was hard to imagine him just gone . Blown to smithereens.
He’d been working on a new coin trick all month, had tried it out on Martim just yesterday—making the coin disappear and then reappear in Martim’s pocket.
If it hadn’t been for Rocco and Thea, the director might’ve been killed. If Martim had been there with them, instead of doing other work that evening, he might be dead, too.
“Thea’s alive, though?” he asked, his voice sounding not quite right.
“For now.” Uchi turned back to the doctor. “How long does she have?”
The doctor cleared his throat uneasily. “Hard to say. She’s at severe risk of fatal blood loss and infection.
If she survives the night, she’ll need most of her internal organs and her digestive system rebuilt, and she’ll never regain full mobility.
If it were just the limbs, it wouldn’t be a problem.
Neuroprosthetics are quite cost-effective these days, but the damage to the spinal cord is extreme. ”
“Is she conscious?” When the doctor shook his head, Uchi said, “Wake her up.”
When they entered the hospital room, Martim was immediately grateful he hadn’t eaten recently.
River Thea was lying inside a medical stabilization chamber, with a dozen tubes coming out of her and surgical arms at work trying to patch her back up.
It was a tall order, as her torso looked like something left over after a dissection demonstration.
Martim glimpsed splayed ribs, ropy intestines, and globs of pink tissue before he had to turn to the wall and put a hand to his mouth to keep the gorge down.
Pull yourself together. Martim took shallow breaths, trying to regain his composure.
It’s just a body, just meat. He turned back around and this time he could look at the mess in the chamber dispassionately.
The lower and upper halves of the body were barely attached, like a doll that had been broken in half and was being held together by string.
Shockingly, everything from the waist down was relatively intact.
Narrow hips, long legs, penis, blue toenail polish on the limp feet.
Director Uchi didn’t seem rattled. Maybe he’d already gotten over the shock. Besides, crisis brought out the fire in him, made him the most intensely Uchi version of Uchi. He strode right up to the head of the transparent chamber and leaned over. “Thea, can you hear me?”
The bodyguard’s eyes cracked open, glassy and drug addled. She didn’t seem to know where she was. Her blood-speckled lips moved, trying to speak through the oxygen mask, but as her lungs appeared to be outside her body, all that came out was a wheeze of air from the tube in her neck.
“It’s not looking good, Thea,” the director informed her. “The doctors are giving you a one-in-five chance, but even if you make it, you’ll probably never be able to walk or breathe or eat on your own again.”
Thea’s eyes widened in terror.
For some reason, Martim found himself thinking about Thea’s bucket list of planetary wonders. She would never see Mount Hanji. Or the Nine Rifts. Or any of those places.
“You don’t have long to make a decision,” Uchi went on with urgent pragmatism. “Martim”—he turned over his shoulder to speak to his atier, who was still finding it difficult to move closer to the grisly scene—“how much would the Agency provide in disability assistance to a midtier contractor?”
Martim wet his lips and forced himself to walk forward. “There’s a formula… It would work out to around fifty percent of her wages for the rest of her contract term. After that, there’s a general assistance fund but no guarantee.”