Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) (30 page)

Why Call Them Back from Heaven?

They were all staring at me, as though I’d grown a second head. I struggled to express an idea that wasn’t yet even a full idea, just a sort of inchoate feeling. “Get a list of those dead,” I told Basil. “I assume that even though they weren’t kept prisoners here, people went through a central control for messages to the outside.”

“Of course,” Basil said. He was back to looking very tired and sighed. “I know we must seem like fools to you, but we’re not actually completely stupid. We knew some control of what they were allowed to say and to whom was necessary. Or at least of whom they contacted. They could call other people in the other centers, not in the seacity itself. We knew they could reveal us when they went on leave, but that was likely to be less of a temptation face to face than in the middle of long, daily contacts with friends and sweethearts. They might reveal us to people in other centers, but that was less of a threat. After all, they too were at least semi-isolated from the seacity.”

“So you know who they called in the other centers?”

He looked startled. And then he was slapping the table again, and the hologram appeared. “Etienne,” He said. “Do you know who”—he rattled off half a dozen names—“called in the other centers?”

The answers came back and he wrote them down. He slapped on the table. “Madame Sienna,” he said, “I don’t know what we can make of it, because it’s possible the person they called most is not the important one, but then two of them called only one person, in each of the other centers.”

“Good,” Simon said. “We’ll take those two.”

“Very well,” Basil said. “Take them and do what?”

“Pass a message down through their network,” he gave a slight smile. “Fly, all is discovered, perhaps.”

“No,” I said.

“No?” Simon asked.

“No.” My mind was working below conscious level again, and I had to fill in the reasons I’d said that instinctive “no.” “‘Fly, all is discovered’ will just lead them to call Madame. We have only a short space of time before they do anyway, out of panic. And we can’t be ready for their attack because we don’t know where and when. The goal is to bring them to us in a place and time of our choosing. We must say something else.”

Simon pulled at his lip. “Yes, I see your point. Perhaps more ‘we are victorious, reveal yourselves and take control’?”

“That’s all very well,” Basil said. “But it won’t help.”

“No?”

“No. If we do that, then they’ll attack. The people they’ll attack will have no idea what they’re doing,” he said. “If I could warn the others…These people are, maybe, five percent of the total, and if we could warn the ones in charge at the centers, we’d have a good chance of defeating them. But if they attack their comrades without warning…”

“Well, what then?” Simon said. “If we tell them to come to our aid they’re likely to call Madame, and that we already have a danger of.”

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“No. Look, in this type of organization, they all eat each other. What I mean is, I got the impression that, like in the original revolution, even the minions of Madame are none too safe. Step wrong and it could be them losing their heads.”

“Yes, but these people are in our own hidden centers. They’re not—”

“Listen to me,” I said. “Are those people who only contacted one person out of the center likely to be high rank, Basil?”

Basil nodded. “If by that you mean they were well-trained specialists, key people I counted on, yes.” He made a face. “Damn them. How could they have let themselves be corrupted by a gospel of the inherent superiority of improved people?”

“Easily enough,” Brisbois said. His voice sounded both heavy and resentful. “How not? It’s in the wording, itself: improved. We’re better, right? And being better, how can we avoid taking over? Trust me, I heard that gospel myself, a little modified, and when you’re young and stupid—and everyone who is young is stupid in a very specialized way—it’s an easy message to convince people of.”

Basil sighed. “But yes. They’re people I’d never have expected to be reachable by conspiracy. Which is what scares me.”

“It shouldn’t scare you,” I said. “This is the message to send out: We have the Good Man. He’s not dead—” Simon made a sound of extreme surprise. I gestured him away. “He’s not dead and we have him cornered with his closest associates. But we are involved in heavy fighting. Basil is dead”—another sound of surprise, which I ignored—“but some of the loyal members of this force are still fighting. We’re near winning but need assistance. If you send only enough people to overcome resistance, we can overpower them, capture the Good Man, Alexis Brisbois, the Good Man’s companion, Jonathan LaForce and Mailys Bonheur. Together we can take them to Madame and claim the glory and honor of having captured her greatest enemy.”

“Yeah, me,” Brisbois said, bitterly. I chose to ignore him.

“Explain to me,” Basil said. “Why this is not like a message to come help us, because we are discovered. Why wouldn’t they call Madame?”

“Because capturing the Good Man is something the revolutionaries, all of them, most particularly Madame, would be grateful for. They’ll want to be part of it.”

“But they’ll let out word that the Good Man is alive.”

“Not hardly,” Simon said. He cast me a speculative look out of the corner of his eye, and then his lips trembled in something like amusement that he pulled back from. It was as though he weren’t absolutely sure how to view me: as a beautiful woman or a dangerous associate. “They won’t talk. I think Zen has it. What the rest of you fail to see is the inherently paranoid nature of this movement.”

“No,” Alexis said. “I see it. I simply fail to see how this can benefit us.”

“They’ll want a portion of the glory,” Simon said. “We know that and we know the conspiracy was paranoid and selfish, because if it weren’t we’d already be hip deep in Madame Parr’s agents. That we aren’t can mean only one thing, and that is they wanted the glory all to themselves, instead of giving the alarm about the invasion. That says all you need to know about the nature of this movement. Even seeing their comrades die, even besieged, they chose to continue fighting alone rather than to call a source of troops, because fighting alone allowed them to have the glory of capturing me. Or perhaps they were afraid of having made the wrong choice, and can’t tell how their movement leaders would react. Judging by those show executions, the movement is more than a little unpredictable, and addicted to blood.”

“They were all very young,” Basil said. “Or most of them.”

“Which explains but doesn’t excuse it,” Simon said. “Still, that being the nature of the movement, they’ll come hot foot to capture me. And then we can try babble juice, or other means to figure out the rest of the moles who don’t come. Do you think there are chances they’re protected with dead man switches, which will kill them if they talk?”

Alexis pushed his lips out, in a considering expression. His eyebrows were low over his eyes again. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Look, they’re not that high-level. Not enough for them to spend the effort, much less the time and expense, of protecting each and every one of them. But that is not the problem, Simon.”

“What is it then?”

“We don’t have the dead men. They can’t believe, in any way that the dead men are talking to them. And if it’s a cell system, anyone else talking to them about secret stuff will set off alarms. They’ll know security was breached. They’ll know something was wrong. They won’t come.”

“Ah…” Simon smiled. “Ah. Indeed. And yet, Alexis, you know what my original was created for.”

“As a spy? You still would need time to infiltrate and establish an identity, and—”

Simon waved him away. “Basil, do you have recordings of these people? Can I see them?”

Moments later, Simon was staring intently at recordings of two young men. The circumstances were much what we could expect of the sort of recordings this sort of installation would make, of course: reports on their guard watch—mostly nothing to report.

The longest reports were the ones where they described what they had done on their leave in the seacity. Mostly telling us where they’d eaten and what they’d done and such. I wondered how much of it was a fiction, but there were heartbreaking glimpses of personality and animation. They’d smile or nod when saying something. And I realized that yes, they were very young. And enhanced. And likely feeling put upon by the Good Man and the world in general. They would be tempted. of course.

Simon played these tapes more than the others. I wondered why. There were no clues to what to tell their contacts in them.

“I think I got it, Basil,” he said, at last. “Do you have uniforms like the ones the dead men were wearing?”

“You can’t hope to pass as them,” Basil said. “They had quite different features. They will—”

“I have no intention of letting them see my features.”

“I don’t see how you can avoid it, sir,” he said. “They will be suspicious if you make two calls and, in both of them, tell them the video is out.”

“Yes,” Simon said. “They’d be if I were stupid enough to do something so dumb. I’m not, thank you.”

“But then—” Basil said.

“Give the man what he asked for, Basil,” Brisbois said, very quietly. I noticed the people who, presumably, knew Simon best, Mailys, Brisbois, LaForce, were not saying anything, hadn’t made any protest. I started to wonder if Simon was some sort of shape shifter.

Turned out, no. What he was was a superb actor and master of stage setting, lighting, movement.

He went away with the reluctant Basil and came back moments later, wearing a uniform similar to what the people in here wore. He moved…differently and somehow managed to look taller. No, I have no idea how. He couldn’t change his features, but his features—once he had played with lighting, the arrangement of furniture and what I’ll call stage setting—were not in the light at any time, or seen fully on. And his features such as they were had that kind of generic quality that a glimpse from the side, a view of the ear or the chin could be a thousand different people.

What was convincing, though, was the way he moved. He was already in character as he came in and started to disarray the furniture, overturning chairs, skewing a picture on the wall, aiming his burner and making a burn mark on the door, just above his head. Basil took in breath at that, but then it must have occurred to him that if the door belonged to anyone it was Simon and that he couldn’t scold a man for destroying his own property.

I got the impression that Simon was enjoying all this more than was reasonable. That perhaps he’d long wanted to destroy his own property.

Then as he did a test run at pretending to be someone else, I realized that despite the different features he managed to give the impression of being the first young man we’d seen on the tapes, and that this young man was making a sort of desperate try on, an attempt both brave and insane.

He backtracked and started playing with light controls by the door. This time Basil did make a sound, as the lights flickered wildly overhead. “Patrician,” he said, and then he joined Simon, and conferred with him in a low voice. To Simon’s animated instructions, he flickered lights, not so much turning lighting off as making it less revelatory. It shone where it shouldn’t and cast other places in shadow, all the while without looking unnaturally dark or suspiciously low.

The first man, Etienne, had been slight with a sort of tripping trick of speech, where each word tried to come out before the other one was done.

Simon captured that way of speech, the pitch of the voice, the way the man tilted his head while speaking. When the man on the other side materialized as a holo in the room—we were behind it, and he couldn’t see us, nor could we see him but as a shadow cast on Simon’s features—Simon delivered the message he’d thought up.

The response on the other side was guarded. “Etienne? Is all well?”

Simon broke the supposed secrecy almost immediately, reacting in an excited way, or rather like a man trying to suppress excitement. My admiration of his acting ability grew, as he poured out, in the exact mannerisms of the dead man and in a tone that was pitch perfect for excitement and triumph, the story of the Good Man coming in with his close friends, of his being captured, of the need for reinforcement, of the glory they could win in the eyes of Madame.