Flight of the Vajra (71 page)

“If it’s any comfort, that wasn’t fakery, Henré,”
“Mylène” said. “I really . . . ‘she’ really
did
like you. I
was just inhabiting her shoes, doing what she would have done. I thought about
replaying her backup into a container of some kind—what they’re planning to do
to poor Arsèni as soon as they can
find
his backups—but I knew something
like that wouldn’t hold up over time. The victim eventually figures out what’s
going on, and in this case, it wouldn’t be long before everyone else did, too.
It was just easier—and really, more interesting from my point of view—to put on
the mask myself.”

Marius took out Enid’s p-knife and began flicking
through its various settings. Either that’s just a fakery of the real thing for
the sake of this CL-space, I thought, or he’s got the real thing and
is
playing with it, and extorted the device key from her while he was at it. “It’s
not even a question of technical know-how,” he said, “it’s a question of
nerve
.
The nerve to do something like this and count on everyone around you banking on
their assumptions about you. And I
knew
I had the nerve.”

“That much is self-evident,” Ioné said. She’d
spent the entire time sitting bolt upright on her couch, hands dug into the
armrests like she was trying to squeeze the very color out of them.

Justification
, I thought. This guy’s like
Cioran: he needs an audience to justify everything he’s doing. No wonder he’s
letting us talk. He needs the argument like a general needs a war to fight.
Hammer on that hard enough and he
will
blow it.

Where was the car by now, exactly? I was tempted
to patch into any available surface I could find and see what telemetry I could
harvest. But I also I didn’t want to sabotage all my end-runs around Marius’s
containment just for the sake of my curiosity—and there was the fact that he
had all of us, especially Angharad, on leashes of various kinds. I decided I’d
just fall back on the assumption that the faster I worked, the better.

It didn’t stop me from indulging in a split-second
fantasy, though: we’d reached the end of the country road that had led us to
Mylène’s estate, and were now returning to the main artery that fed back to the
city’s main hub. Just over the tops of the trees, sunset blazed; everything
that wasn’t greed was red, and soon everything that was green was red as well
. . .

Well, I told myself, if you ever want to see all
that again, get back to work.

“Still,” Marius was saying, “I wasn’t going to do
it forever, which is why when news of this whole business crossed her
desk—excuse me,
my
desk—I decided it was time to stop sitting on my
hands.”

“In other words,” I said, “the only reason you got
away with all this for so long isn’t because you were so smart. It’s because
everyone around you was so
incurious
. That’s not much of an achievement,
is it?”

He re-crossed his legs as a way of containing his
exasperation a bit more. “You could just as easily call me stupid for telling
you everything I just did. I don’t mind telling people how I got here. Where
I’m going
from
here, though—that’s not something I’m going to give away.
That, you have to earn.”

“How do we earn it?” I said. My dread came out
sounding like sarcasm.

Marius opened his hand to let Enid’s p-knife
reconfigure itself into the single-shot pistol mode, then pressed a pellet of
Type E substrate into the chamber.

“Take this,” Marius said, then nodded at Angharad,
“and kill her with it. For real, of course.”

No one moved.
Marius closed his hand
around the weapon and held it up to show us all it was loaded.

“The Kathaya is only a position,” he said, “but all
the same, it’s something you’d give your life to fulfill, isn’t it?”

Angharad shook her head so very slightly. “If I
had to. But I prefer not to.”

“Let me put it this way,” Marius said, and aimed
the muzzle at Angharad’s face. He was suddenly no longer on his throne; he was
standing barely a meter from her, and the barrel of the gun was close enough to
her forehead that she could have touched it by leaning forward.

Enid let out a gasp loud enough to make me think
she was on the verge of crying.

On the throne, Mylène’s image leaned back and idly
swung one foot around.

“What if, by dying,” Marius went on, “you could
guarantee that others wouldn’t die? The other people in this car, or on this
planet, or any number of other places—wouldn’t saving them be worthwhile? And
what if I offered that opportunity to someone who wasn’t here, someone who
might be very willing to take me up on it?”

“I think you at least understand,” Angharad said,
“that dead I am of no use to you at all.”

Marius made a
go-on
gesture by wiggling the
gun slightly. It was still aimed right between her eyes. I didn’t doubt for a
minute he really was doing this in the confines of the car.

“Whatever it is you offer in exchange for killing
me,” she went on, “it will be nothing compared to what will arise on its own in
the wake of my death. No one bullet will stop that.”

After several more moments of her not flinching,
Marius lowered the gun. This time, he took the trouble to walk back to his throne,
and on reaching it threw himself into it, shoving Mylène slightly to one side.

“Is this how you honor your mother?” Angharad
said.

Oh cosm, I thought, don’t even start with that
now. It’s not going to work.

But go on she did: “Is this how you do honor to
the ones who gave you life?”

“Do honor to my mother?” Marius said, like he was
repeating bad news. “My mother doesn’t deserve the honor! My mother has
always
wanted to look like she was on the outside of everything!”

Mylène fitted a new cartridge to her inhalerette and
gave it her undivided attention.

“Listen,” Marius said, “let me tell you a story.”

Inside, I was thinking:
the
CL lock
.
If I’m going to do something about that, now’s the time. Everyone else’s CLs,
Angharad’s included, were now visible through the reverse proxy I’d set up
inside Marius’s filter. I could send commands, but odds are anything I did he’d
see immediately and react to. And the only way to get everyone out of these
cuffs, disable the neckbands, and shut off the CL filters entirely is through
him.

Then I thought: Go back. Back to what he said
about Mylène’s own CL. He’d copied Mylène’s CL module, keys and all, so it
could run side-by-side
inside his own
, as a way to throw everyone else
off. Not impossible, but not supported, not sanctioned, definitely not legal
. . . and not at all recommended for anything outside of a controlled
test environment because of the many, many security problems with it.

Question: If Marius was thoughtless enough to use
an off-the-shelf CL filter with known security issues which he didn’t bother to
compensate for properly, what are the odds he didn’t do such a great job of
locking the windows on his co-hab CL?

Answer: Only one way to find out, right?

Given that I had exactly one shot at this, I set
to work preparing a payload that would fire off a shotgun spray of known
exploits for such a situation. If any one of them paid off, I’d have a short
window of time—a few seconds—inside which I could take control. As long as he
keeps talking, I thought, I have time to get that ready and make sure he’s
caught off-guard. He’s a good multitasker, I thought; he proved that in our
last little fight. I probably have less time to do my damage than I think.

Out loud I said: “I absolutely want to hear a
story.”

I got to work as he talked.

“One of the first things I did,” Marius said, “when
I took control of everything of hers was to trace back all the claims she had
been making about her ex-husband, my father. They were all dead ends. Not
because he’d done his best to sever ties between us, but because those ties
never really existed in the first place.
She inseminated herself to conceive
me
, because none of the other males who were attempting to court her at the
time were ‘good enough’. There was always something. That was exactly how she
put it in her CL-diary: ‘There’s always something, isn’t there?’ Always
something that only
she
could see, only something that
she
knew
was going to be a problem. And to tell me the truth of it wouldn’t have helped
her. It had to be a story about someone else who wounded her and ran off, so
there would be someone else she could blame.”

Out of some dim and not-entirely-paralyzed part of
my mind (the CL lock had nothing to do with that), I remembered hearing about the
issues involved with gendermutes who had fertilized their own egg via their own
sperm, most of them social rather than technical. Most people have no cause to
do it and lie about it, but Marius and Mylène weren’t most people.

“Is it the lie itself that bothered you?” Angharad
said. “Or is it that the lie made it all the easier for you to reject her? Were
you not all this time simply looking for whatever reason you could to push her
away?”

I should concentrate on my work, I told myself, let
Angharad do the talking. She’s better at this than you are.

“And what if I was?” Marius said, “
 
‘Standing alone is the
Highend Way’, and all that? Typical of
you
to criticize. I care about
being true to the spirit of what she would have wanted, not the letter of it.
If she didn’t want me to be like that, then why would she have hammered on it
so hard? She wanted me to stand up and be my own person, like all the others,
like she was herself—well, she got what she asked for, didn’t she?”

“Marius,” Aram muttered, “I recommend—”

“Quiet, you.”

(I finally dared a glance into the real world,
around Marius’s blocks. We were in the loop around the edge of the main urban
hub, fast approaching the turnoff to the road that eventually led to the ship docks.
We still had plenty of time, but if I was going to do something I wanted it to
happen where we’d have a good chance of getting help as quickly as possible. In
his left fist—his
real
left fist—Marius still had Enid’s p-knife, still
at the gun setting and still loaded, and still pointed—however loosely—at
Angharad.)

“You know,” I called out to “both” of them, “you
say you don’t mind telling us how you got here, but there’s still a part of the
picture that’s not clear to me. The part on the inside. When this all started,
what exactly were you thinking? Did you just go in there and see your mother’s
dead body and say to yourself, ‘
You know, incest really does have untapped
possibilities
’?”

Enid had risen from her seat and taken slow steps
towards Marius’s couch—not spoiling for a fight, from the look of it, thank
goodness. More like she wanted to see for herself, as closely as possible, all
of his abhorrence at once.

“My mother raised me to make my own decisions,”
Marius said, settling back into his seat. “She wanted me to know, without
hesitation, what it was I wanted, and act on it. So if you think about it ... I’m
the best and most faithful son she could ever have.”

Enid drew back her hand and smacked Marius across
the jaw. Not a slap; a full-blown, closed-fist punch. It rattled Marius’s head
around and slapped his teeth against each other but did no real damage, this
being a CL space.

 “That’s for kissing me earlier,” Enid said. “I’m
giving it back.”

And since I couldn’t come up with any more or better
distractions on my own part, at that moment I sent the payload.

There weren’t any
gaps in the whole
thing when I played it back later—no overloads, no blackouts. All the better,
because I couldn’t trust anything but my own CL copy of the incident.

0.0 seconds: In the time it took for the payload to
transmit and unpack itself, I switched on the Escapist and tensed. The whole of
my attack had been focused on Marius, so cosm knew what kind of retaliation his
big friend would be able to cook up. I was banking on either Ioné or Enid to do
something about that as soon as they had a moment. I’d be paying a serious
price later for ramping myself up to hundredth-of-a-second timings, but if this
didn’t work out it wouldn’t matter.

0.04 seconds: The CL-space Marius had created fell
completely away and was replaced with the real inside of the car.

0.06 seconds: One of the payloads hit its mark and
gummed up Marius’s CL links, including his remote of Angharad.0.1 seconds: Another
payload unlocked everyone’s manacles.

0.3 seconds: Ioné sent out an SOS scream on the
general IPS CL frequency. In the same moment, she flung an elbow into Aram’s chest
and shoved a fist under his chin—just as his own arm began to bulge and his own
internal armaments started coming online. Looks like he was sporting the same
kind of armament Ioné had, I realized later.

0.9 seconds: Aram’s head, and most of the canopy
for the car, vanished into grit and flying shards and flaming haze as Ioné’s
own main armament went off into it.1.1 seconds: Aram’s arm fired once on its
own and blew out the window next to Enid.

1.4 seconds: Enid kicked out at Marius’s arm—the
one with the hand that still held her p-knife.

1.5 seconds: Enid’s kick folded Marius’s arm up,
and the blast from the p-knife’s muzzle tore open the side of his neck.

1.8 seconds: Ioné fired again, down through the
floor and to one side, and blew out an axle.

The rest wasn’t retained as a distinct sequence of
events, at least not for me. All I remember was the world outside the car
swimming around, Enid screaming, Angharad crying out, ashes and blood and
protomic tinsel stinging my eyes and the stench of a dozen different things on
fire.