Forty-Four
FORTY-FOUR
Kob opens the door and River Thea storms inside.
She’s fixed—sort of. Technicians in the Elite Renewal clinic must’ve done a quick patch job to get her going until more extensive repairs can be done.
The gaping rend in her abdomen is sealed shut with some sort of skin-colored flexible material that Isako can see through the second stager’s torn uniform shirt.
She’s moving funny, as if her legs are stiff, more similar to an older-model jarbrain.
Isako prefers it that way—seems more honest.
The bodyguard looks mad as hell. She glares hatefully at Isako for a long moment before turning to the man who everyone thinks is her client. “What have you told them?”
“Everything.” Martim spreads his hands unapologetically. “They’re holding all the cards, in case you haven’t noticed. They could turn me over to the Agency, or reveal my identity to the entire Company, and then what do you think happens?”
Thea doesn’t answer, but Isako knows. What Uchi and Martim have done is beyond the pale.
It’s the most shocking crime she’s heard of in all her years of contract work.
Sandbar Uchi would be posthumously stripped of his directorship.
SoCon GasPro would likely be broken up and placed under new leadership.
Uchi’s assets would be confiscated and his name would never receive any memorial in Tenacity.
As for Martim, a deckhand contractor who’s occupying a synthbody illegally and impersonating a director in order to infiltrate the Board?
Immediate termination. They’d pull his brain right out of its casing and toss it in the incinerator.
Thea remains unmoving for a minute, until Isako wonders if she, too, is going to start glitching out. She seems to keep it together, though, and turns to Isako and Kob with a brave defiance that doesn’t mask the fear behind those glass eyes. “So what are you going to do?”
Isako wishes she knew.
She looks at Martim—really looks at him.
Thus far, she’s been avoiding it, letting her eyes drift off center from his face.
Rationally, she can understand that it’s not Sandbar Uchi in front of her, but she still can’t accept the jarbrain on the sofa as the young man she once knew and trained.
She thought Martim was dead. She was upset— grieving , she realizes now.
She wanted to avenge his murder and bring him justice.
She wanted it more than she wanted to complete her contract.
Now she almost wishes he was dead. It’s a terrible thought, but if Uchi actually had murdered his atier to tie up loose ends, the truth would’ve been so much simpler and easier to stomach.
Because if there’s one thing she wants less than for Martim to be dead, it’s to be the one responsible for getting him killed.
She doesn’t see how she has any other choice.
Even though, the longer she looks at him, the more she can actually see him underneath the vulgar costume of Sandbar Uchi’s face and body.
Dressed up in the synthbody as if it were one of his expensive designer suits.
Not made for him, perhaps, but he wears it well nonetheless—the armor of power and respectability.
Somewhere behind Uchi’s steel-gray eyes, there’s the flame that made Dragonfly Martim try so damn hard all the time, the chip on his shoulder that was more like a heavy yoke, the keen intelligence, the hunger to be near greatness.
She sees the Martim she knew. She glimpses the version of him that is a stranger.
The atier whom Sandbar Uchi trusted with his worst deeds and secrets.
Isako voices the truth that must be said. “I’m on contract.”
“I told you,” River Thea hisses to Martim, distraught. “I told you that we needed to kill them before they killed us. She’s working for Minto and the reunionists, what did you expect?”
“I’m standing right here, jarbrain,” Isako reminds her acidly.
The woman spins around with a stiff jerk. “You demanded a meeting and came around acting so concerned for your poor dead apprentice. I knew it was just an act.”
“Shut your mouth,” Kob says, so brusquely that even Isako’s taken aback.
Thea’s hand starts to go for her triggersheath.
She’d be insane to try to fight them—it’s two longknivesmen against one in close quarters, both of them bigger and better than her.
She’s barely being held together with a giant plastic bandage.
But maybe she doesn’t care. She doesn’t even feel pain anymore, so why not go down fighting?
“Thea, stop already,” Martim orders.
The bodyguard twitches and freezes at the sound of Sandbar Uchi’s emphatic voice.
Kob speaks to Thea, low and slow. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.
You don’t know me or Isa, and you certainly don’t know what it means for an atier to fail to finish their contract.
” Strikebreaker swings his gaze back to Martim.
“I walked away from a contract once, and it came back to haunt me. The decision saved my soul, but even though I thought I was doing the right thing, there were consequences. Ones that arguably weren’t any better.
Our own judgment can’t always be trusted. That’s why atiers rely on the Code.”
“The Code is our compass,” Isako mutters, more to herself than anyone, but for the first time, the words feel as though they’re being dragged out of her. Client service led them here. It trapped Martim within an unthinkable crime. Kob’s question rings in her head.
Can you say you still trust the compass?
If only she were still working for Forest Greves.
If only she’d resigned alongside him. If only she were a true ronin, like Kob.
But she’s not. “I’m under contract.” She speaks the inescapable truth out loud again, feels the crush of it like iron chains.
“My client gave me one final assignment: Prevent Director Uchi from ascending to the Board.”
“The director’s dead .” When Martim stands up now, he’s as tall as Kob, taller than Isako.
There’s grief on his rugged face, and the horror of realization that the artificial body he inhabits is truly all that remains of Sandbar Uchi.
“He was my client. I was his atier. I was supposed to protect him. And you killed him. With a gun .”
Martim stares bewildered at Isako as if he’s never seen her before.
As if she’s become as unrecognizable to him as he’s become to her.
She doesn’t know what to say; the moment she fired the gun doesn’t seem entirely real to her either.
She can justify her decision, now that she’s had time to process the enormity of the director’s crimes.
But the truth is that she went into the building to kill Uchi and that’s what she did. Like any shadowcon.
She crosses her arms, shields herself from Martim’s abhorrence and her own. “Why did Uchi go into cryo unless he was planning to come back out?”
Her apprentice answers by shrinking away from the question. “He was my client,” he repeats. “He signed me to my first contract. He was going to offer me an Exclusive. Maybe he wasn’t a good man, but at least he was a great one. And he… believed in me.”
Martim sits down again and covers his face with his hands.
Isako has the strange urge to take a seat next to him, to lean against him in understanding, even though she’s the one responsible for his heartache. She knows what it’s like to lose a client. Even when they betray you in incomprehensible ways, they’re still your clients.
“You’re a ronin now, Martim.” She turns to Thea. “So are you.”
“What does that even mean for us?” His confusion sounds like that of a little boy being told about old Earth, a place so difficult to imagine that it might as well be made up.
“It means you’re free,” Kob answers solemnly.
“You’re no longer bound by Code to carry out your client’s orders.
You don’t have to accept his place on the Board.
You don’t have to act the way he wanted you to act, or vote the way he wanted you to vote.
You don’t have to sit in Sandbar Uchi’s chair, keeping his jar ready for him.
You can make your own decisions, as awful as they might be. ”
Martim struggles visibly with what he hears.
She can see the tension on his face as he tries to extricate his sense of self from his role, to think of himself as anything but Uchi’s loyal atier.
It must be nearly impossible, she realizes.
A difficult task for any longknivesman, much less someone in the extraordinary position of occupying his client’s life.
“I don’t want to die,” he says slowly, voice low with shame.
“I’d rather live as Sandbar Uchi than not live at all.
With our client gone, Thea has no right to her synthbody either.
The only way we survive is if I keep going.
If I continue being Uchi by joining the Board, rallying the terraformists, and making the vote go the way Uchi intended it to. ”
“You know that I can’t let you do that,” Isako says, with deepening dread in her heart. “Uchi’s dead, but the rest of the Company doesn’t know that. To them, and to my client, you’re Uchi. Which means you have to be stopped.”
“I know.” Martim raises his eyes to her. “You can complete your contract without much effort. You could kill me right now, but recording this conversation and handing it over to the big-Es would accomplish the same thing.”
“Why are you still talking to them, then?” Thea sounds garbled again.