Forty-Four #2
“Because I’m tired of lying .” When Martim’s voice rises, it’s eerie how he channels Sandbar Uchi at his most resolute.
“Maybe it’s possible to think my way out of this trap.
Maybe I could talk my out of this and scheme up some elaborate way to still make Uchi’s plan work out.
But I don’t want to try anymore. I’ve been trying so damn hard for so damn long and I’m sick of it.
” He gestures at Isako and Kob and lets out a choked, disbelieving laugh.
“Christ, I’m up against Quickblade and Strikebreaker.
Agency legends. I know when my number’s up. ”
His voice falls in apology. “I’m sorry, Thea.”
Slowly, the bodyguard’s face goes blank with defeat, and she says nothing.
Isako’s misery is a bitter thing she can taste on the back of her tongue.
She doesn’t want to accept some of the things she’s already done: abandoned friends, terminated colleagues, committed murder with an illegal firearm she accepted from terrorists.
She thinks of the woman who handed her the gun, Selene—once a respectable number-crunching wagewoman with a toddler, now a stridently badgeless, car-bombing soldier of United Freelancers.
The line between who you think you are and who you could be is awfully fucking thin.
Where does it end? she wonders. Where does the long list of things she’ll do to remain a good atier end in her own obliteration?
“Fucking hell. Fuck this. ” She gets up, paces to the door, paces back again.
Presses the heels of her hands to throbbing eyes.
She’s lived by the Code her entire career.
Kept stubborn faith in it. Instilled it into her apprentices.
If she breaks it now, then all that means nothing.
If she betrays her client and walks away from her contract, then she’s not Quickblade.
She’s not the daughter of Isthmus Akio. She’s not someone she recognizes.
It’s one thing to be willing to die. It’s another to give up, in painful stages, the person you thought you were. I’ll have nothing , she thinks. No resignation, no coda, not even the sense of meaning and completion that led her into the Elite Renewal this morning.
But—and she realizes this with abject despair and relief—she doesn’t have it in her anymore to follow the Code until the last, to do what it demands of her.
Just like Strikebreaker standing before the grown son of a man he sent into the Vastness, she’s come to the moment when the circle closes, when she can go no further.
“Maybe there’s another way,” Kob says quietly.
She stops her aggrieved pacing to look at him. “Another way, how?”
“How does an atier escape client obligation, besides fulfilling it or dying? Simple. If the client cancels or changes the terms.” Kob tilts his chin down, thinking.
He’s negotiated, debated, and settled countless seemingly intractable disputes—sometimes by determining a middle ground, sometimes by not yielding a single inch.
“Who else knows the truth?” he asks Martim.
“No one. I think Condor Anand has suspicions, but the only other person who knew everything was Dr. Moth Lucan, the synthtech surgeon who Director Uchi trusted to do the recorp. But Isako killed him, too.” Martim doesn’t look at his old mentor.
“Lucan was guilty of a synthtech ethics violation heinous enough to get him terminated a dozen times over in any Company hearing.” Isako’s ashamed of how crudely she dealt with him, but she doesn’t regret that he’s dead.
“It wasn’t part of your contract to kill him,” Thea cuts in. “No one appointed you judge and executioner.”
“It’s done and it doesn’t have any bearing on the future,” Kob says, with the blunt, argument-ending authority that Strikebreaker is famous for bringing to difficult situations.
“What have you told Cityhab Security and the media about what happened at the clinic?” When Thea hesitates to answer, he reminds her, coolly, “We’re a long way past the point where it’s advantageous for you to hold back vital information. ”
Grudgingly, Thea says, “Cityhab Security believes United Freelancers is behind the bombing at the clinic and the murder of Dr. Lucan. A reasonable conclusion since they’re already publicly claiming responsibility.
I had the director’s original body removed before anyone could examine it too closely.
I told everyone that Director Uchi made it out of the clinic safely and returned to SoCon GasPro headquarters.
” She glances at Martim. “The security team has the office locked down tighter than the vastblasted Genebank so no one will doubt that you’re back there, and I had Birch Yong in IR release a statement from the division condemning the terrorists and stating that you were fortunate to have evaded them. ”
Everyone nods. They’re all contractors here. They can appreciate good work.
“Good. So no one will be surprised when Sandbar Uchi shows back up to work as usual and goes to the Board confirmation hearing as scheduled.” Kob says to Martim, “Like you said, if you want to come out of this alive, you’re going to have to remain Sandbar Uchi, at least for a while longer.”
“What are you thinking, Kob?” Isako presses.
“What would your client and her reunionist allies value even more than Sandbar Uchi being discredited and defeated?”
She sees it now. “Having him in their pocket. Under their control.”
Sandbar Uchi as a high-profile turncoat. The preeminent rising star of the terraformist movement betraying his faction and voting with the reunionists. If Savannah Minto could ensure Uchi’s complete cooperation, she would gleefully take that over his death any day.
Bright kid that he’s always been, Martim understands right away. He recoils from the suggestion immediately. “You’re suggesting I go over to the people who want me dead .”
“They don’t want you dead,” Kob points out. “They want Uchi negated as a threat. They can have that, if you offer them something valuable that you’re in a position to provide.”
“You mean, promising to change his vote at the AGM?” Thea says, catching on more slowly.
“Or abstaining, when the time comes. Have a sudden crisis of conscience about the Great Silence,” Kob suggests. “Decide the common people are entitled to know the truth after all.”
“Why would Savannah Minto trust me to keep my word?” Martim asks.
“Because you’ll tell her who you really are and what your client did to you. Give her a guaranteed way to destroy you, and she’ll be confident that you’ll be dependable.”
Martim protests, “Tide Sullivan and the other terraformists would turn on me as a traitor. Condor Anand would probably try to have me termed before I could ever be of any use to Minto. I could lose everything, including control of my division.”
My division , Isako notices.
“If the Great Silence ends, everything will change,” Kob declares.
“Those who advocated for connection with Earth will hold political power. Sullivan and the GasPro divisions will be sidelined—except for you. You’ll be protected by Minto and the reunionists, who’ll want to keep you alive and on their side, to bring Uchi’s die-hard supporters along and convert other terraformists. ”
Martim’s shaking his head, his face scrunched up in denial, because he can see why Kob’s strategy is sound.
“You’re asking me to do the exact opposite of what my client ordered.
The director would curse me from his grave.
We spent years —he spent nearly his entire life—devoted to the Founders’ Vision. ”
“Do you believe in the afterlife, Martim?” Kob asks. “In the Waiting? Or in heaven?”
Martim falls uncomfortably silent for a long moment. “I used to, when I was a kid. My kithmother took me to Holy Mass and prayed over the rosary.”
“And now?”
He stares down at his large hands. “I don’t know what I believe anymore, just like I didn’t know what to think when I learned the truth about the Great Silence.
I don’t even know if I’m really alive. I still feel like a real person even though I’m a bunch of gray matter controlling a fancy vehicle.
I can’t say if I have a soul, or if we’re nothing more than electrical pulses between neurons.
” He closes his eyes and opens them again, as if to test that he can still do the simple things.
With resignation he says, “If Leanne was right, though, if heaven exists—my client’s not going there, and neither am I. ”
“Either way,” Kob says, “you won’t be answering to him again.”
Thea looks between the three atiers with an uncertainty that gives her soft, symmetrical features a lost, deceptively childlike expression.
“I’ve never felt strongly one way or the other about terraforming,” she admits.
“I’ll be long dead and gone before we get either the Founders’ Vision of a terraformed planet or the reunionist dream of a journey back to Earth.
The way I see it, we need to squeeze all the life we’re able to get out of what we have now.
I’ll back your decision, Martim. We’re in this mess together, and you’re the only client I have left. ”
Martim asks Kob, “When would we have to do this, for it to work?”
“After the confirmation hearing, once you’re essentially an incoming member of the Board. Isako would bring you to parley with Minto.”
“She might just decide to fuck us over right then and there,” Martim points out. “Go public with what we tell her, watch SoCon GasPro burn to the ground, and salt the ashes.”
“She might,” Isako agrees. “But one thing second stagers like Savannah Minto are better at than the rest of us is taking the long view. If we’re betting on her choosing between immediate satisfaction or shrewd self-interest, my scrip is on her seeing the value in bringing ‘Uchi’ onto her side.
Even if that means conveniently overlooking the worst policy violation any of us have ever heard of. ”
Thea mutters, “Still sounds like a hell of a risk.”
“It is,” Kob says. “But it’s how you both get to keep living with any degree of safety. And how Isako completes her contract.” He looks to her with eyebrows raised and the ghost of a wry smile on his lips. “What do you say, Quickblade?”
That’s Strikebreaker for you, she thinks.
There’s a reason why he’s the atier directors would seek out in a crisis.
There are other big, tough longknivesmen in the Agency capable of intimidating troublesome workers or crushing obstruction with brutality.
There aren’t many with the mind of a chess master, who can do what Kob can do.
Maybe this is what he loves, or used to love, about the work.
Why he never took an Exclusive contract and kept moving from client to client.
Because the times he can walk away from a job having completed it without bloodshed make up for the times that he can’t.
It’s morning; the sun is cresting over the towering black pillars of SoCon GasPro headquarters and bathing the penthouse apartment in the bluish glow of another workday.
There’s a stirring in Isako that might be hope.
“It’s surprising anyone in this room is still alive.
” She turns her face to the light. “I’m up for keeping it that way. ”
Martim gets to his feet and goes to the window, stands in a shaft of dancing dust motes as he looks down at the hustle of people and vehicles below.
“Uchi believed that if the Great Silence were to end, it would be a catastrophe for civilization on Aquilo. We’d be giving up control of our destiny, throwing the fate of millions of people to a distant power we know nothing about.
” His strong, gnarled hands close on the windowsill.
“What if he’s right? What if I end up fucking over humanity to save my own skin? ”
“Humanity’s been fucked by plenty of others besides you,” Kob replies.
“And there’ll be others to come, you can be sure of it.
Maybe your client’s right, at least in some ways.
Or maybe he’s wrong, and the end of the Great Silence will usher in the golden era the reunionists hope for.
You can’t possibly know. They don’t know either.
Those second-stage gold badges with all their supposed experience and wisdom—they’re only human, like the rest of us.
Maybe less so.” Strikebreaker spreads his hands.
“Terrifying, isn’t it? Welcome to life after Code, kid. ”