Bitter Angels (41 page)

Donnelly, Misao said, was commander of Habitat 3. Vijay’s smuggling run was supposedly out to the habitats. Was Donnelly involved with the smugglers? Was he trying to kidnap us so the operation wouldn’t be discovered? If that was so, why not just have Kapa Lu kill us?

Kapa said he didn’t know what Donnelly was up to, and Misao believed that. So did I. Kapa had gotten in on the game because he was given freedom, or at least an internal drive ship, which was as good as freedom. With that as a prize, he would not question his employer’s motives.

And out in the middle of the black sky sat the Blood Family in their fortified palaces. According to the permission records and shots from the telescopes, not one of them took a step outside to actually oversee the system they supposedly governed. Except, that is, for the Grand Sentinel Torian Erasmus, who on the surface looked as disconnected from any business of actual governing as the rest of them.

Forgetting.

Forgotten.

When something is forgotten, it is consigned to oblivion.

Oblivion was dead.

Why had the Blood Family let Oblivion die?

And if you were going to let them die anyway, why waste an entire world? For almost a century, the prison had been highly successful and very profitable. I’d been elbow deep in the accounts when I was doing the historical analysis. The prison and prison labor from Moonfive had been almost as profitable for Erasmus as Hospital. Why not just go in, shovel out the old corpses, and restart the place? The infrastructure was all there. The ecosystem could be restored in five years or so.

And it wasn’t just Oblivion they were wasting. I looked around me with fresh eyes. This place, too. All these people, who were struggling to survive. If they were put to work, not just in a random press-gang style, but concentrated as a workforce, they could be the basis of rebuilding the Blood Family’s fortunes. Diaspora worlds always needed more hands than they thought they did. But they were letting it rot. Oh, they had Clerks and secops all over the place to keep anybody from getting ideas—and to snatch up whomever they needed—but there was no mechanism for governing, no chain of command between the people and the Blood Family.

Favor Barclay, the highest-ranking Security official on Erasmus, had been shoved out of his station. Amerand Jireu’s personal Clerk jumped to his death. The cover-up was clumsy and amateurish, and the network did not even bother to act like it was going to blame Amerand Jireu. In fact, his Clerk told him he was going to be used to finish the system, and if
he knew what that meant, he was a better actor than any I’d ever seen.

And maybe the real culprit for Clerk Hamahd’s death was Dr. Varus.

But Dr. Varus was from Hospital, and whatever the hell it was they were doing on Hospital, it wasn’t selling services to the diaspora worlds. In the past six months, there’d only been in-system flight from Hospital to Dazzle, or to Fortress. Unless they’d all been erased, no flights at all had come into or out of the system. But why erase the kind of flights that had been so common up to a couple of years ago?

Dr. Varus had also treated Siri, briefly, but she
had
treated her, before Siri had started acting erratically. Before she’d told Vijay a story about the Clerks’ network and voices siphoned from people’s bodies. But not before she’d decided that Bianca could still be alive, and on Hospital.

“Oh,
fuckless
!
”
I shot straight up. The heads of passersby turned and just as quickly turned away.

I took off running.

Hologram.

I staggered backward. In front of me, through the partly open door, Siri sat in her room, in her favorite listening posture, one hand on her knee, one hand on her control unit.

On a Pax world, this would have never worked. But here, the datasphere was so fragmented and those fragments were so tightly controlled, no one bothered to walk around with their sets or their implants switched on. I didn’t even know if Orry
had
implants.

I shoved the flex screen aside and twisted the lock. It recognized my touch and snicked open a split second before I shoved my way through the door.

And Siri was gone.

I stood panting in the empty room, the blood draining to my feet.

My knees wanted to crumple, but I couldn’t let them. I walked back into the listening room, pulling my set out of my belt pocket. I clipped the set to my ear, connected it to my glasses, and plugged in the lead to the comm node. If I could get a bead on what Siri had been listening to, maybe I could work out where she’d gone.

I plugged the other end of the lead into my set, and listened.

I heard silence, cold and absolute, without even any static. I pulled the set off and checked the connections. They were solid. I checked the power indicator on the back of the comm node. It was there. I clipped my set back to my ear and moved my hand across the node, seeking another frequency, another signal.

Nothing. Silence. All silence.

For days, Siri had been in here listening. She said she was amazed at how clearly the voices were coming to her, that
she was even getting something new underneath the usual unfiltered voices.

I got nothing but silence.

I unclipped my set and tucked it carefully back inside my belt pocket. Siri was gone. She had been hearing voices, and she had followed them out into the city of Dazzle.

And I had no idea where.

Siri had told Vijay that the Clerks’ network was running on human voices, essences stolen from living people.

My hand dropped. Siri would assume Vijay had betrayed her. Siri might assume Vijay was working for the enemy.

Vijay was out at the port, with the smugglers. And Siri knew that.

I ran out of the room, bellowing for Dr. Gwin.

Her mother had known that, and that was the real reason she’d left. She thought Emiliya was in good hands, and she had to get her other children, who were…less well connected, out of the way.

Because there was never going to be an end to the Erasmus System.

That phrase kept replaying in her head as Emiliya walked down the corridor to her dorm room.

Her door was unlocked. She went inside. It was almost exactly as she had left it. It had been cleaned and searched, but that was standard practice. Plus, of course, the Grand Sentinel would want to make sure she had no lingering secrets.

She would have done the same.

Emiliya sat down on her hard chair and swiveled her desktop toward her. She couldn’t see straight. She should
get some sleep, some food. She barely ate anything on the trip back, and she certainly didn’t sleep.

But she unfolded the screen from the desktop, slid the cover back on the keypad, and began typing. She entered all her codes, old and new, and watched the world unfurl before her.

Reports. Requisitions. Experimental write-ups. Years’ worth of information, decades’ worth, flitted past. Experiments on cells, on embryos, on full-grown animals of increasing complexity, and, starting five years ago, on humans. The list of subject numbers was four columns long.

Emiliya skimmed through the reports, picking random experimental results and skipping down to the summaries. The frustrations and setbacks of seeking “true” immortality flashed before her eyes. Bellicose arguments shot back and forth. Theories were built up and torn down. It was the whole tangled mess of scientific and technological progress. It was impossible to fake such a mess. The fakes were invariably too tidy and didn’t involve anything like enough people—or enough failures.

She flicked forward and backward, jumping randomly through time, tracking not by chronology but by the names of experimenters. She followed individual progress. She connected requisitions to personnel records, to names she vaguely recognized as having been dropped by friends of friends.

The final breakthrough seemed to have come about two years ago. A new subject entered the experiment. After that, the fetal trials began to succeed. The babies started maturing, instead of growing tumors and expiring in the womb. The new subject got the tag: IDFM40981A.

Emiliya’s fingers ached. Her eyes blurred, but she didn’t
stop. She activated another cross-check, flicked through another set of reports, looking for a name and an origin point. Where had IDFM40981A come from? If there was falsification in all this, that might be it.

At last, an initial health report opened. Human subjects all had to be scanned and examined when they came in. Variables had to be recorded and accounted for, including names and worlds of origin, even if they were never mentioned again.

Emiliya read the report.

Of course IDFM40981A was Bianca Fayette. The missing saint. The Solarans sent an immortal into the Erasmus System, and the system took her apart to see how she ticked.

Emiliya’s hands fell into her lap.
So that’s it. It is real. The Blood Family, or at least select members of the Blood Family, are going to live forever
.

And she really did have to choose whether to join them.

Or maybe she’d already made her decision. Her heart thumped hard against her ribs. She stood. She could barely feel the ground under her feet as she walked down the corridor to Piata’s room.

The door was open. The room had been stripped. All traces of personal occupancy had been removed. Only the basic furniture everyone was issued when they came to Hospital remained.

Emiliya drifted inside. She stood in the middle and tried to keep breathing. It was far too like her mother’s empty suite.

“He’s gone,” said someone from the hall.

Emiliya jerked around. Stash Madison—another member of her cohort who had only attained mediocrity—leaned against the threshold, his arms folded.

So. She already was Blood Family. She’d turned Piata over to them and hadn’t thought twice about it. Piata had asked for it. It was his own fault this had happened to him. He’d gotten clever, gotten greedy.

She’d won, really. She could keep on winning.

“Maybe you should get out of there,” suggested Stash.

“Yeah.” Stash looked worried, but a cleaning drone polished the floor behind them.

“I’m tired,” she said, just in case he was wondering how she was. “I’m going to bed. You on first shift tomorrow?”

“Yep. Seein’ you then?”

“We go where we’re needed.”

She drifted back to her room. She shut and locked the door, not that it meant anything.
They can get in whenever they choose
.

She had turned Piata in. She’d been living with that for days. The fact that she was Erasmus, as opposed to just Erasman, shouldn’t make any difference. There was no reason for it to.

Except it did. It made all the difference under the whole black sky.

Emiliya smoothed her hair back, wondering what she should do. She probably didn’t have a whole lot of time. The Grand Sentinel didn’t seem like he was willing to wait forever. Maybe she should get a good dinner, gorge herself on meat and cake and fresh vegetables. Things she hadn’t
tasted in years. Of course, now she was going to have that forever. She was Erasmus.
Blood
. Surely whatever was going to happen next was going to have a life of luxury as part of it.