Authors: David Gunn
Chapter 34
I’M WONDERING HOW BRIEF TO MAKE COLONEL VIJAY’S moment, without wanting to push him into fury or despair. Since I never knew my parents, their death didn’t touch me. Can’t imagine what it would be like to have the general as a father. Suspect it’s one of those things you don’t want to think about.
While Colonel Vijay gets over his misery, I go check on Leona.
She’s missing.
That is, the fire escape is empty.
A sound of water splashing leads me to a door.
At first I think she’s taking a piss but it lasts too long. Twisting the handle, I find myself in another bathroom. The biggest I’ve seen. More a room with a shower for its ceiling.
Sergeant Leona stands in the middle, stark naked.
Hot rain falls from above onto the coloured pebbles at her feet. A cactus grows from the pebbles in one corner. Damn thing is soaking wet, but it has to be a cactus because it has spikes. A little bridge joins her part of the room to mine.
The stream separating us is fed by water that runs down a marble slab set into one wall and disappears into a floor-level slit in another. I have no idea how the fish living in the stream survive the hot water raining down on them or stop themselves being swept away.
Unless they’re an illusion.
As Leona tosses her hair, shampoo sprays upwards and she raises her face to the ceiling to rinse herself. She’s humming something loudly. Sounds classical. A march, or one of those strange pieces Debro likes.
The sergeant’s body is perfect.
I mean it. Firm buttocks, soft waist and wide hips. Legs that combine elegance with looking like they could squeeze the life out of you. Her breasts would fill, but not quite overflow my hand. A flash of nipple as she turns slightly takes my breath away.
And when she kneels to wash her feet, I’m speechless.
I’d know that arse anywhere.
There isn’t a man in Farlight who wouldn’t.
Only the arse I remember is bronze. And its owner kneels beside a different stream. She sits in a park in the oldest part of Farlight, near the cathedral. Serenity, says the plaque on her base.
No idea if that’s her name, or why she’s supposed to be peaceful. Sitting around naked by a stream with a body like that can only attract attention. As Leona stands she sees me watching.
‘Shit,’ she says.
Having clicked her fingers to stop the shower, she grabs a towel and wraps it tightly around her. She wears it like armour.
‘Sergeant . . .’
‘ Yes and no,’ she says.
Her feet seem small for the boots she’s been wearing. The tattoo on the inside of her wrist has a barcode and number I don’t begin to recognize, and the dog tags around her neck are not standard issue. Hanging beside the tags is a weird-looking key.
‘Oh well,’ she says, seeing me look. ‘You were going to work it out eventually.’ Her voice is sad as she adds, ‘I used to love this place.’
You used to . . .?
Sergeant Leona holds her ground as I stamp towards her, fists bunched. This is a militia NCO, I tell myself. An NCO who disobeyed an order.
A direct order. I could shoot her now; no court martial and no appeal, and still be within my rights. Only, she’s not really militia, is she? And that’s no way to treat soldiers, militia or not.
The thought stops me dead.
‘Nature,’ she says. ‘Nurture. They’re a bastard pair.’ Obviously enough, I have no idea what she’s talking about. ‘I need to get changed,’ she tells me.
Then waits for something.
‘You plan to watch?’ Leona asks after a while.
When I say nothing, she shrugs.
‘Guess so.’
Dropping her towel, she reaches for a sodden singlet and wrings it out, before dragging it over her head. Climbing into a thong, she yanks up her combats and slides herself into a shirt and then her flak jacket. Her light machine gun, boots and helmet stand in one corner, away from the water.
‘How’s Vijay?’ she asks.
‘You knew he was here?’
Leona shrugs. ‘It seemed likely. Although it was hard to be certain with the nodes down. There are only a few left. As I’m sure you realize.’
I’m sure I don’t.
She opens the door for me.
At a window, we stop so she can look at Farlight.
I’m not sure what she sees that I don’t, but when she turns away there are tears in her eyes. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this,’ she tells me fiercely. ‘Not now, not then, not even in the beginning.’
She’s talking to herself.
She has to be. Nothing she’s said so far makes sense. ‘You didn’t answer. How is Vijay taking the general’s death?’
‘Badly.’
‘Good. Better he gets over it now.’
Leona agrees that cutting Morgan’s throat probably helped. The U/Free was behind this. She nods when I say that. Not just him, she tells me. But he was part of what happened. And now the general is dead, killing Morgan, I tell Leona, will help Colonel Vijay negate some of his inevitable guilt.
Inevitable guilt?
Where does this stuff come from?
‘Your head,’ says Leona. ‘Intelligence is a construct. Well, mostly . . . You have yours locked down.’
‘Fuck,’ I say. ‘You’re—’
‘Run in survival mode long enough, you’ll believe that’s all there is.’
I’m not sure if she’s talking to me or about me. Maybe both. And I notice that, not only did she interrupt me, I allowed it to happen. That tells me we both know she’s not a militia sergeant.
‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I’m—’
‘One of OctoV’s handmaidens.’
Taken me long enough to work it out. They’re stuff of rumour and fantasy. Only the most intelligent, most talented, most beautiful and most deadly are ever chosen. The official version says all are virgins. Their relationship with OctoV is chaste and he’s interested only in their beauty and weapon skills. Obviously, that’s bollocks.
‘You don’t believe it, do you?’
Of course not.
You don’t put a fourteen-year-old in a harem and expect him to be interested in needlework, sword skills and musical talents. I imagine OctoV screws himself stupid most days. If he exists at all.
Leona looks at me. ‘Ah yes,’ she says. ‘I forget.’
She forgets I’ve talked to our glorious leader. And to his mother. At least that was how he introduced Hekati, the autonomous and self-aware habitat on the edge of Enlightened space. The ex-habitat.
Hekati no longer exists. I still hear her screams in my head.
‘Sven,’ Leona tells me, ‘there are no handmaidens. There haven’t been handmaidens for years . . . Centuries,’ she corrects herself. ‘Not for centuries.’
‘Then what are you?’ I demand.
‘Good question,’ she says. ‘A monster, I guess.’
She stares through the window at the burning city, and then looks at the black zep still hanging in the sky. ‘They lied,’ she tells me. ‘They said the furies would be programmed to kill only specific, pre-chosen targets.’
‘You don’t programme furies,’ I say. ‘You release them.’
‘These ones were supposed to be different. The U/Free promised.’ She shakes her head, runs one hand through her hair and flicks sweat from her fingers. Her mouth trembles and she looks close to tears again.
‘Leona. Who are you?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Believe me,’ I say. ‘It does.’
Don’t want to kill her. But if she’s a traitor, I will.
Chapter 35
‘LET US START,’ SHE SAYS, ‘WITH WHO I WAS . . . LEONA ZABO, third in command of App 85. An exploratory mission with terraforming abilities. Five officers, fifteen NCOs, one civilian physicist, two biologists, a pet geek, and sixty passengers.’
Leona shrugs.
‘They were frozen, obviously.’
Obviously?
‘Thirty pairs,’ she says, adding, ‘the passengers,’ when I look blank. ‘That was our minimum for long-term DNA mixing. Sixty disparate sets. All of us had been screened for hereditary diseases, genetic weaknesses, the usual.’
Leona turns back to the window. She’s looking for something. When she finds Calinda Gap, she stops. So I guess she’s found it.
‘That’s where our lander crashed,’ she says. ‘Caught in the bow wave. Its core went critical. All that fallout fucked the carefully chosen DNA . . .’
‘Caught in the what?’
‘Bow wave,’ she says. ‘The singularity bow wave. A hundred and fifty years out. We’d been left behind and then the future overtook us.’ Her mouth twists and she bites her lip without realizing it. ‘Pods fell out of the sky, oxygen scrubbers failed, half the food coming out of the Drexie was poisoned.’
She wipes her eyes.
‘I assumed command when Colonel Farlight died. Major B didn’t disagree. Of course, she was dying by then. I named our base after the colonel, and our landing fields after Major B . . . Betty Emsworth,’ she adds, in case I’m not following.
‘And then,’ she says, ‘I went to sleep. When I woke . . .’
Leona nods at the city beyond the glass.
‘Most of that was already there. We had oxygen, water, grass and trees. A main street, a square, a cathedral. All it needed was people. And that wasn’t a problem because Calinda downloaded minds into meat as fast as she could.’
A bit of me is worried I’m not following what Leona is saying.
A bigger bit is fucking terrified that I’m following every word. She’s one of the originals. That makes her high clan. High clans live longer. What I don’t get is why she’d pretend to be a militia sergeant.
What was she doing delivering messages from Vijay Jaxx?
And what the fuck does she think she’s doing out on a night like this? Anyone with her money should have holed themselves up behind high walls or abandoned the city when the riots went out of control. For most, leaving Farlight means using roads. But the clans have planes and copters. Some are said to have gates. You enter one side, you exit somewhere else.
‘Sven.’ She takes my face in her hands. ‘You still don’t get it.’
‘What?’ I say crossly. ‘What the fuck don’t I get?’
‘Take a good look at me.’
‘I did, remember? You’re Serenity.’
Leona smiles. ‘That’s one of my names,’ she agrees. ‘Major Zabo is another. A few people, like you, know me as Leona. As for the rest.’
She hesitates.
‘It gets complicated. I died, you see. So Calinda held me while my new body grew. Only I liked being inside Calinda, and she liked having an interface. This was before Hekati made the AIs unite. And that was long before Gareisis . . .’
Oh fuck. ‘You’re . . .’
‘No one betrays OctoV while I’m around. Don’t care if it’s pretend. Don’t care if it’s a trick. We’re not signing. Wasn’t that what you told Colonel Vijay on Hekati?’
She’s got it word for word.
‘So you’ll keep this quiet, right?’ Leona says.
That’s not really a question. Turns out, she’s M’OctoV. Mission eighty-five. Made flesh in the person of Captain Leona Zabo . . .
‘But OctoV’s a boy.’
She sighs. ‘This body’s older,’ she says. ‘Usually I’m younger. Think about it. Curly blond hair, soft hips, puppy fat. Everyone says I look androgynous.’ She stops to explain what that means. ‘It began years ago. The questing prince. Strong but defenceless. Young but timeless. We never bothered to . . .’
Her words dry up.
Colonel Vijay looks less pale than he did. His floppy hair is pushed from his eyes. He’s obviously washed out his mouth, because droplets stain his flak jacket. Although now isn’t the time to mention it.
‘Sven,’ he says. ‘If I might have a word.’
As Colonel Vijay nods towards the door, Leona shoots me a look that tells me to keep her secret to myself. OpSec, apparently. So I grin and she scowls, which only makes me grin harder.
The body of Paper Osamu’s husband lies where we left it, blood glazing the tiles and staining the grouting between them. A greenness tinges his face. Meat rots fast in this heat, unless he was rotten already. Who knows how long he kept that body?
‘This savagery is planned,’ Colonel Vijay says. ‘The light tanks on the bridges, the zep with its furies, half the militia out of the city, the rest corrupted. It suggests an intentional strategy.’
Thought that was obvious.
Furies don’t appear by accident. They’re illegal, even here. You have to source them, make shipping arrangements, grease palms and fix paperwork.
‘The Thomassi,’ he tells me, ‘are behind this.’
I don’t doubt they’re involved.
For all I know, they planted stooges in the crowd to say which houses to burn and which shops to loot and which to save. But this is bigger than a bitch fight between the Jaxx and the Thomassi over who gives the best supper parties, or whatever these people really quarrel about.
And even if you throw in Farlight’s archbishop, the mistrust believers have of doubters and the city’s previous history of rioting, it’s still bigger than that. He must realize it. There’s a crowd in the street below calling for OctoV’s death.
OctoV’s death.
They want peace with the Uplifted. Trading rights between planets, votes for all, not just male members of the high clans. The death penalty must be abolished for all but the most major crimes.
‘Sir,’ I say. ‘It’s—’
Colonel Vijay’s not listening.
‘The Thomassi insist we killed their senator.’ He sounds outraged at the slur. No, he sounds young and scared and furious. ‘Everyone knows that’s a l
ie.
’
‘You did kill their senator.’
The colonel gapes at me.
‘Sir,’ I say, ‘I killed him. That was how I met Aptitude. On her wedding day, as her wedding feast was about to begin. I should have shot her as well. Before the ceremony began—’
‘But why?’
‘Because those were your father’s orders.’
Vijay shuts his eyes.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘I don’t do whys. I do whats. So I don’t know why the general had Senator Thomassi killed. Why he chose then to do it. Or why I was chosen to carry it out. But he did and I did and the senator died. Your father declared war on the Thomassi and they fought back. Your father knew something would happen.’
‘Not this,’ Colonel Vijay says.
I wouldn’t put anything past the old bastard. His conscience wasn’t deleted, so much as overwritten to military standards, and the technicians who oversaw it taken out and shot. All the same, I agree.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I doubt he expected this.’
There is a lot that doesn’t make sense. This control room for a start. Just who are the U/Free controlling? The Thomassi? The archbishop? General Luc’s Wolf Brigade? The city militia? The crowd of believers looting shops below?
All of them? Or none?
Now is the time to tell Colonel Vijay about Leona. Something stops me. Partly, that he’s close to cracking and I’m not sure how much more he can handle. But also I can see an advantage in not telling him. Hell, there can’t be that many people in history who’ve had the emperor on tap.
‘Sven,’ he says, ‘where are your friends?’
He means the Aux. ‘Anton’s gone to fetch them, sir.’
‘Are we expecting them any time soon?’ His drawl is returning, the smile on his lips is supposed to suggest it’s all so amusing. That’s how I know he thinks this is the end. If not here, then near here. If not now, then soon.
He’s putting on his armour.
Colonel Vijay Jaxx, teenage son of General Indigo Jaxx and new Duke of Farlight, although I don’t think he realizes that yet, is getting ready to d
ie.
Being Death’s Head, he intends to do it well.
Me, I intend to live, until that stops being an option.
Then I’m going to join him.