Flight of the Vajra (72 page)

My CL playback told me it all took about fifteen seconds
total. The rest of me just said I was in that place for a long, long time.

Eventually, I could feel my hands and face again,
the former wiping the latter and coming away covered with smears of red and
back. The car was on its side—I couldn’t tell where; everything not more than half
a meter away was a white smudge—and directly in front of me I saw Ioné spraying
down the skinned-off half of Marius’s face and neck with first-aid gel—green
gel that quickly turned red as it mixed with his blood and hardened. His mouth
was open and his lips flapping slightly as he gasped in little breaths, and
both him and the seat cushions around him looked like they’d been in the way
when a wine bottle had exploded. Big mica-shaded-and-bismuth-colored chunks of
what was left of Aram were littering the other half of the cabin; Enid and
Angharad were nowhere in sight. From somewhere I heard what sounded like
crying, coughing, and choking all mixed together; I couldn’t tell if it was one
person or several making those sounds. Everyone was covered with gobbets of
impact ablation foam, like slowly deflating clouds. The pounding in my head
gave everything its own blurry haze—another of the many side effects of using the
Escapist—and the inside of my mouth tasted like sweat and charcoal.

I closed my eyes and decided I liked looking at the
dark better than anything else that was around me.

“He’s still alive,”
I heard Ioné say,
possibly to me. “Kallhander and a detachment are on the way. I’ve already
briefed them. You shouldn’t try to move.”

“He” was probably Marius, I thought. I couldn’t
tell if I was supposed to be relieved or disgusted.

I re-opened my eyes, stood up, and felt one of my
legs not doing a very good job of following my mind’s orders. It didn’t hurt,
it just seemed to be lagging, the way one’s brain does when the right word obstinately
refuses to come to mind. But after some moments I was able to put weight on the
leg and slowly hobble out of the seat.

I reached down to pick up the p-knife. Whether
Ioné had pulled it out of Marius’s hand or it had been ripped free of its own
accord, I couldn’t tell. Blood was smeared on the handle. I wiped it on a piece
of seat cushion and used it to clip off a lock of Aram’s hair, which I could
tell at a glance wasn’t organic. The p-knife’s key appeared to have been
revoked, as it patterned itself right to me and folded appropriately.

“Henré, you shouldn’t be—!”

I ignored Ioné and stepped out through the torn
top of the car.

The car was on its side, lying next to the
entrance to the main urban loop. The city’s veiny grid of streets and mirrored
low rooftops all glittered as fiercely as the sea beyond did, all red with both
sunset and moonrise. From somewhere in the distance I heard the stuttering
whoop of sirens, growing louder and closer.

Enid was kneeling at the side of the road, the
flesh hanging heavy on her blood-spattered face, staring somewhere past me.
Angharad was prostrate across Enid’s lap, sobbing into it violently enough to
summon the dead.

So she had been the one uttering that strangled
cry I heard when I came to, I thought. This is all wrong; it’s Enid that should
be bawling in
her
hap.

I polled Enid’s CL. It wasn’t reporting any major
damage—a torn muscle here, a bruised rib there. Angharad would need a formal, in-person
looking-over; I didn’t trust the telemetry coming from that black-market
special CL she’d been jacked with.

“Enid—you didn’t kill him,” I said. “Ioné’s
patching him up right now.”

Angharad’s sobbing subsided. Enid went on running
her hands slowly through the other woman’s hair.

“You did the right thing,” Angharad said, in a
voice that was throaty in a way I wouldn’t have ever associated with her.

Just once, I thought, please let me able to say
words like that to someone and make them
matter.

“Enid, I’m sor—”

“Well,
I’m
not sorry,” Enid said. Rage
washed in and swept away all of her numbness. “I wished I’d been able to slice
his whole damn head off, the way he was going to do to all of us. Turnabout’s
fair, isn’t that what they say? So, no, I’m not sorry; I’m not sorry one little
bit. For what he did to her, I should have cut him into pieces—” Her voice
began to break and heave. “—and fed him to—his
cat
—”

She stood up and continued sobbing out things that
could have been words, but were just now raw pieces of grief. Angharad stood up
with her, no longer weeping, and let Enid rest her head against her own
shoulder. The older woman’s eyes were large and dark as the sunset shined
obliquely against them, and she even managed a small smile as I put my arms
around the two of them together.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Kallhander said
somewhere behind me.

I looked up and turned. Two helios and four
ground-cars had surrounded the accident and had disgorged what looked like a
dozen IPS officers. Ioné stood right behind Kallhander, wiping the first aid foam
from her fingers and looking about as hollowed-out as the rest of us.

I guess Continuum had programmed her to do that,
too, I thought. And again, for our sakes.

“We need to revoke the entire city’s protomic key
infrastructure,” I said. “It’s all been compromised, and for cosm knows how
long now. Who knows what else he’s planted—”

“They’re setting that up now, but it’ll entail a
rolling citywide blackout of all systems,” Kallhander said.

“Don’t tell me they have no contingency plans for
something like this!”

“They do. This is it. The system has to be brought
off-line in stages, wiped, and then brought back up piece by piece. Otherwise
there’s no way to tell if he still has rogue programming lingering somewhere in
the system.”

“Well, at least we’re not going to be totally in
the dark.”

“No, but enough of us will be in the dark at any
given moment to make me worry.” He looked at me. “I’ve already had this
argument with them, Henré.”

“There’s more. Angharad’s been CLed.”

Kallhander closed his eyes for a long moment, then
forced them back open.

“You’ll probably want to have someone look at it,”
I went on. “I think it’s stock—I don’t think there was anything crazy in it—but
with this guy, cosm only knows . . . ” The ashes in my mouth had been
getting fouler by the second; I turned my head and spat. Doing anything at all
with my neck sent pins and needles raking up and down my shoulder and arm. I’d
probably pinched a nerve while I was at it, but sitting down and running a
diagnostic on myself was the last thing on my mind.

“Look,” I said. “If I read this right, there’s two
safe places in this city right now. The first is IPS HQ, for the exact reason
Marius needed to blackmail his way into it. The second is my ship. Nothing
against you, but I’d rather go back there for now.”

“You’re confident the keyset for the
Vajra
wasn’t compromised?” Kallhander said.

“I don’t keep that key in my CL in the first
place. Sometimes a plain old non-CL, memorized password does the job nicely.” I
could have gone on about how a few more old-school tricks like that might have
spared this city an insurrection or three, but I didn’t figure he needed to
hear it. From what I’d been able to gather, they
did
have such measures
in place. Marius/Mylène had just been able to systematically undo all of them
over time.

“Do you want to take Angharad and Enid back with
you?” he said.

“That’s up to them, really.” My head buzzed; the
whole adventure—and the Escapist on top of it—was taking its toll. If I didn’t
find someplace to get off my feet for a while I’d fall over. “But if it was up
to me—”

“—you’d want them somewhere where Marius or any of
his cohorts wouldn’t have an upper hand. And yes, the
Vajra
has the
advantage of being mobile.”

“Look, we shouldn’t be talking about this. Who
knows who’s listening.”

“Henré, we’ve been CLing this whole conversation
on a completely private channel.”

He was right. Through my haze and self-absorption
I’d barely noticed all the flags and indicators; we were doing a full-sensory
feed, and that had made it all the more confusing.

“You’re in bad shape,” Ioné said. “We’ll escort
you back to the ship. A squad also found your cycle back at Mylène’s house; I
imagine you’ll want that returned as well.”

“No rush on that,” I said. Like the
Vajra
itself,
I’d kept the keys for Kanthaka separate in my own memory. Other people stop
calling that kind of behavior paranoid the day you’re proven right for doing
it.

Ioné borrowed one of the helios that had landed
and flew us back to the
Vajra
’s dock. Even being up way over the tops of
buildings and trees didn’t help bring the sun out that much more; the sun was
already sunken past the horizon, and everything was being splashed in the
blue-and-red night I now knew to expect from this place.

Enid placed across her lap a box of towelettes
that she’d stolen out of the car’s first-aid kit, and went through about four
or five of them wiping off her face and hands. Angharad, next to her, did the
same, sponging off her neck and behind her ears as well. The used wipes went
into the little pullout bin between their feet, piling up like so much paper
snow. Both of their outfits were a wreck. Enid’s CL had polled her frayed
nerves and compiled a litany of minor injuries, none of which had needed anything
more than a liquid bandage, save for the muscle she’d all but torn in her leg
from delivering that kick.

“It’s not a shower,” Enid said, referring to her
wipedown, “but it’ll do for now.”

She sounded almost chipper—and when she looked at
me after she said it, she did seem at the very least calm.

“In the wake of all this,” Angharad said, “I
suspect the entire summit will be canceled.”

“That or everyone’s just going to bail on their
own.” Enid looked at me around the towelette she was wiping with. “There’s
already a lot of public chatter about that.”

She made an it’s-in-the-air gesture—like the air
itself was what was doing the talking. Looks like she’s seeing once again how
being and staying CL-linked has its advantages, I thought.

 “Did they look you over yet?” I asked Angharad. “For
that thing he stuck you with, I mean.” Oh, cosm, I said to myself, don’t
tap-dance around it; that only makes you look foolish. Tears on her part
doesn’t mean she can’t talk about what happened to her.

“Briefly,” Angharad said. “They examined it and
believe it was installed without any danger to me. Physically, that is.”

“What did they do, wipe it and reload it with a
stock firmware?” I said.

“I don’t know. It’s been temporarily deactivated
pending a closer examination.”

“What a slag,” Enid muttered. “Still can’t believe
he had the nerve.”

“We should probably get that removed soon as
everything calms down,” I said. “It won’t take more than a few minutes tops,
and it won’t throw you off your stride or anything; it’s barely more
complicated than a—what is it?” I said that last part quietly; I could see
everything I was saying was just zinging off her hide and not registering.

“I actually thought we might leave it in,”
Angharad said. “At least, for now.”

Enid stared at her and forgot to keep wiping.

“It only occurred to me just now,” Angharad went
on, “in some ways how fitting it all is. This—” She touched the back of her
neck. “—was done against my will, after a lifetime of living without it. But
now I have it, and while it can be turned off or removed entirely, it presents
me with a . . . an opportunity of sorts. A choice exists now. I can
remove it and go about my business as usual, which will be applauded in all the
expected circles. Or I can leave it as-is, and speak from an entirely new
position of experience. A metaphor, of a sort.”

I started to see where she was going with this. I
let her finish the thought out loud.

“If I remove this,” she said, tapping the side of
her neck. “that will be ‘proper’, but at the same time rather . . . easy.
Would it not be better to show that if I am to tell others to refuse this as
best they can, that I should show I can do it, too? And not just once, but
constantly, every day of my life?”

I wanted to beg her not to give me so much to think
about after we’d just been thrown around like luggage, but I knew by now that
was one of the things she excelled at.

“It might work,” I said, “but it might also crater.”

“Yeah,” Enid said, “it might just make people say,
‘That’s all fine for
you
, but you’re the Kathaya.’
 
”

Angharad’s smile was almost wistful. “Would they
not say such things anyway, if they were already so inclined?”

They would, I thought. Of all the things she
understands, she most understands what she’s up against.

 “All of this,” she went on, “came to me in the
moments after I had finished crying about what had happened. For that, I also
apologize.”

“I should say the same thing.” Enid stopped wiping
her forehead and went to work on the inside of one ear, suddenly doing her best
not to look me in the eye. “The way I was blubbering like a baby out in front
of everyone—”

“You both had good reasons for it,” I said.

Enid faced Angharad for a moment, then reached out
and started wiping loose something that had gotten stuck in one of the other woman’s
eyebrows—a bit of first-aid gel, probably. “I wasn’t kidding about what I said
earlier, you know,” Enid said. “About wanting to carve him up into kitty
chow—that’s on the
nice
end of what I wanted to do to him. The whole
time he was talking—the whole time
they
were talking—everything they
said, every time he put his hands on me—”

“He used all of us,” Angharad said, “just as he
used you.”

“Yeah, but you know what? I was using
him
from the git-go, too, remember? We
all
were. I said we should do that, I
was okay with the idea, and you said yes, Henré, and I went ahead and—I
let
him treat me like that. Just to see if anything useful came out of it. So,
really, I should know better than to feel like I was betrayed.
I
was the
one who jerked him around first.”

And yes, I thought, I’m also the one that agreed
it might be a good idea. And wringing my hands about it in front of her doesn’t
make it all better.

“But that’s what this kind of stuff demands of
people, doesn’t it?” Enid went on. “If you can’t take the heat, and all that.
Well, don’t ask yourself anymore if I can’t take it. I
have
to take it.
Because if I don’t learn how to take it now, then I’m never going to be able to
take it when it gets
really
bad.”

Enid threw one leg over the other and sat back with
her eyes closed. Ioné had her back turned to us the whole time and didn’t once
turn around. I let myself remain comfortable in the assumption she could see
everything she needed through the sensory surfaces in the cabin. Angharad went
on wiping her face, a good way for her to hide from us what might have been
there.