Forty-Three
FORTY-THREE
The gun makes less noise than Isako thought it would.
The bullet hits the clear surface of the cryostasis container between the eyes of Uchi’s original body.
Two long cracks appear in a massive, jagged X in front of the serene, resting face.
The synthdoctor on his knees in the corner lets out a horrified cry as frost spreads like a rapid fungal growth from the edges of the fracture and the lights on the side of the unit start blinking in urgent warning.
“Oh my God.” The second-stage Uchi lowers his arms but seems otherwise paralyzed with shock. “Oh my God, what have you done ?” He sags, arms spread, against the broken capsule.
Isako aims the gun at the pale, balding synthsurgeon, who squeezes his eyes shut and whimpers. “Get up,” she orders him. “Use your badge and passcode to open that door.”
Trembling with fear and outrage, the doctor gets to his feet and does as she demands. When the door swings open, he says, defiantly, “Do you really think you’ll get away with this?”
“ You didn’t.” She puts the gun to his temple and pulls the trigger.
When the doctor’s body hits the floor, she turns the barrel of the weapon on Director Uchi, still half collapsed in front of his own body.
“Move. We’re getting the fuck out of here right now.
” She strides over and drags the big man to his feet, gun pointed at his head.
He doesn’t know it’s empty, and he doesn’t resist her, just keeps looking down, benumbed, at the lights on the side of the cryostasis unit as they blink from orange to red and the numbers drop toward zero.
“You can’t do anything about that,” Isako hisses. “Now walk.”
The clinic’s restricted research lab contains an emergency-exit stairwell.
Still following the map she’s committed to memory, she shoves a hostage Uchi ahead of her at gunpoint.
His guards might be dead or incapacitated, but Cityhab Security will respond to the report of an explosion and arrive in minutes, if they’re not here already.
When she pushes Uchi out of the clinic onto the sidewalk, she looks for the rented car she left parked on the street behind the building last night, just in case she ended up in need of a getaway vehicle.
The car is gone. Sulfurous smoke and ash choke the predawn air and the whole block has been cleared.
It seems Waterboy’s people did too thorough a job.
Every vehicle’s been removed from around the building.
Fuck.
Headlights blink on from across the street and a car comes swerving around the road-closure signs through the yellow haze. It glides up to them and stops with a jerk.
Kob opens the car door. “Get in.”
“Showing up in time to save my ass is becoming a habit of yours.” She’s so happy to see him, she can barely think straight as she forces Uchi in first and climbs in after him.
Kob floors the accelerator, then glances over at her while concentrating on manual driving.
He’s taken the car off Companynet navigation, although the vehicle won’t let him go nearly as fast in this setting as Isako would like.
“Told you we’d see each other again,” he grumbles over his shoulder.
“Glad I didn’t end up waiting as long as I thought I would. ”
He takes them back into SoCon GasPro. Back into the belly of the beast.
Director Uchi doesn’t say anything. He appears to be in a state of shock, if that’s even possible for a jarbrain.
All the usual symptoms of distress one would expect to see in an ordinary human—clammy skin, rapid breathing, nausea and vomiting—don’t apply to people in second stage.
Instead, he appears to be mentally and physically glitching.
Going into a sort of crash mode where he becomes motionless for minutes at a time, not even blinking or moving his pupils.
She imagines error messages popping up as his synthbody tries to restore neural connection. Sitting next to him is fucking creepy.
When they arrive at their destination, she motions Kob to take them around to the back of the building, where they won’t be seen entering. Uchi jerks and seems to come back to himself. “Why are we here?” he demands.
“You know why.”
As they get out of the car, he says, a touch indignantly, “You don’t have to keep pointing that at me.”
“Got to keep up appearances,” she says, “don’t we?”
“You’re a hostage,” Kob reminds him. “Act like one.”
But Isako doesn’t want the empty gun on her hands either. She feels poisoned by it, somehow ruined, made less of a longkniveswoman. This is how it feels, she imagines, for a renowned artist to plagiarize their final work. For an elite athlete to cheat in their last match.
She disassembles the weapon with loathing, tosses the pieces one by one down the trash chute outside the building. Kob sees but doesn’t say a word.
They take the elevator up to the top floor of the building. It’s barely past 0700 and the sun isn’t up yet. No one’s in the halls; everyone who lives here is still asleep. An eviction notice is posted on Dragonfly Martim’s penthouse apartment door.
“Open it,” she says.
Uchi stares at the door as if she were forcing him out an airlock.
She thinks he might glitch again and freeze in the middle of the hallway like an overly realistic mannequin.
Instead, he reaches into an inside pocket of his wool overcoat and pulls out an atier’s silver-rimmed black badge on its chain. He scans it and pushes open the door.
Martim’s apartment is as untouched as it was when Isako last searched it. She turns on the lights and shuts the door behind them. “So you kept the badge,” she says. “But you never came back here.”
“There was no point.” Uchi’s voice is muted. He stands in the middle of the apartment, his back to them. Slowly, he takes off his fedora, holding it in his hands. His silver-haired head sags. “And it would be suspicious. Besides, none of my clothes fit me anymore.”
He sits down on the sofa, broad shoulders hunched forward as if in pain.
“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Martim,” Isako says. “Starting with how the fuck you were recorporalized in your client’s synthbody.”
Kob crosses over to the window and looks outside.
Blinking red text is scrolling across the nearest of the city’s many revolving billboards, interrupting the routine flow of KPI data and Company announcements.
Global average surface temperature: -33.
6°C +0.06… Species introductions: 154 +9…
brEAKING NEWS: 5 PEOPLE INJURED BY EXPLOSIONS AT ELITE RENEWAL SYNTHTECHNOLOGY CENTER…
ILLEGAL FIREARM USED IN SHOCKING MURDER OF RENOWNED SURGEON…
UNITED FREELANCERS CLAIMS RESPONSIBILITY…
“Before you say anything else, you better contact your people— Uchi’s people,” Kob suggests, “and get them to stand down. That bodyguard of yours is probably losing her little red head. We don’t want a citywide manhunt for Board nominee Sandbar Uchi to suddenly converge on Dragonfly Martim’s apartment, do we? ”
Uchi— Martim —places a call to River Thea.
“I’m fine, I’m at my old apartment,” he explains.
“Come up with some story to reassure everyone I’m not in any danger.
” A lengthy pause during which Isako can only imagine the bodyguard’s reply.
“They already know the truth, Thea. There’s nothing for you to do right now besides get yourself fixed up. ”
When he ends the call, he looks up at Isako accusingly. “You didn’t have to do that to her.”
“You’d rather it was the other way around? She can get patched up, good as new. Those of us who aren’t in synthbodies can’t say the same.”
Kob touches the controls to opaque the windows before turning away from them. “As far as payback goes, she got off easy.”
Uchi/Martim grimaces. “I didn’t hire the shadowcons. Please, you have to believe me on that, Isa. And I wouldn’t have let Thea do it either, if I’d had any idea she would go that far. She panicked, trying to protect me—to protect us .”
Isako finds it hard to look at the man while he’s speaking, especially when he uses her name as if he knows her.
Her brain stutters trying to reconcile the body of Sandbar Uchi with the identity of Dragonfly Martim.
But when he raises his eyes, there’s no doubt that the person sitting on the sofa is not Sandbar Uchi.
There’s a boyishly vulnerable expression on the aged face, a questioning, frustrated, determined earnestness her apprentice would exhibit when she was trying to teach him a difficult longknife skill. “How did you figure it out?” he asks.
“You left an empty dose of sudexatrine in your apartment.”
Kob adds, “You arranged to have Uchi’s medical records cleansed but not your own.
You don’t have Gray’s Waste. Or any other related disease.
It wasn’t hard to infer that the medication must’ve been for your client.
It’s impossible to be recorporalized with an advanced neurodegenerative disease like Gray’s. ”
Martim laughs weakly, and even in Uchi’s voice, it’s his own laugh. “I thought I played the part well enough to fool even the two of you.”
“You almost did,” Kob says. “When we met in your office—Uchi’s office—I had a feeling afterward that something was off. Some little things didn’t seem quite right, but… my memory’s not what it used to be.”
“You had me convinced,” Isako admits. “I only realized the truth when I saw Uchi in cryo. If he’d already gone through the Process, that body would be dead and empty. There would be no reason to preserve it.”
Martim’s reply is bleak. “If you figured it out, others will, too, eventually.”
Kob crosses back over the room and looks down pityingly at the man on the sofa as if he were a three-headed rabbit or some other genetic experiment gone horribly wrong.
“I’ve heard of some crazy shit when it comes to synthbodies.
Models being stolen, altered, and resold to the highest bidder.
There’s a story of a director who took someone else’s synthbody for his own as a spoil of war, before that sort of thing was outlawed in policy.
Uchi recorporalizing his bodyguard into his ex-wife’s synthbody last year was a major scandal.
But this ?” He shakes his head in disbelief.
“This beats everything. What in the name of the Mother possessed him?”
“I don’t even know where to begin,” Martim mutters.
Isako sits down across from him. “Just start talking,” she suggests.
By the time Martim’s done and has nothing else to say, Isako feels as though she’s been dropped into an Agency relicensing simulation cooked up by a truly twisted programmer.
You discover a fellow atier has been illegally recorporalized and is impersonating a Board nominee on his client’s orders. What do you do?
Kob stops his slow pacing and presses his fingertips to his temples as if he’s feeling another migraine coming on.
Isako watches him worriedly. “There’ve been conspiracy theories for years about the Great Silence,” he says.
“Including speculation that it’s scheduled to end on the fifth centennial, and that the Sweetsea and the Board are hiding the truth from the public.
But there’s never been proof to substantiate any of it. ”
“I saw the confidential memos to the Board with my own eyes,” Martim says. “Director Uchi took me with him to meet with the Executive, who confirmed it’s true. The Great Silence could end this year—if the Board votes in favor.”
“And you’re supposed to make sure it doesn’t.”
Martim nods. “It was the director’s final wish. The last assignment he gave me. Stop the Board from making a terrible mistake that could put an end to terraforming.”
Gods of old Earth, Isako thinks. Her client, Forest Greves, never knew how close he was to seeing the reunionist dream achieved.
A long-lost connection with Earth restored, society once more gazing up at the heavens and seeing a future among the stars, the Company’s resources devoted to bold, spacefaring goals and the betterment of humanity instead of the obsession with gas production and painfully incremental gains in atmospheric oxygen.
Something twists inside her. Greves would never have resigned. If only he’d known the truth, he wouldn’t have taken the final walk into the Vastness. He would’ve lived and done everything in his power to shepherd Aquilo into the future. Isako wouldn’t be a ronin.
She’d laugh if it didn’t make her want to cry. “Martim… that is fucked up .”
“Uchi was already the sort of person to believe that the normal rules didn’t apply to him,” Kob says, “but sudexatrine also has side effects. He might not have been in his right mind.”
“He knew what he was doing.” Martim bows his head. “So did I.”
“You agreed to this?”
“I chose it over being terminated, so yeah, I guess so.”
Insistent knocking on the apartment door makes Isako start out of her seat, hand on her triggersheath. The voice that comes from the other side is an unwelcome one, pissed off but still irritatingly high and honeyed. “Let me the fuck in.”