Scratch Monkey (16 page)

"Be glad." Closer. Oshi could feel it now; a certain lust. "You don't have to deal with the eaters of minds."
Need to smell that skin, feel that face beneath my fingers again.
The warm slick skid of eyes, the crackle of vertebrae. Tears and blood and desire.
While I'm still alive.
Memories of the goon impaled and thrashing on her halberd wrapped around her mind.

"What's
with
you?" Raisa tensed, abruptly rigid. "Hey, look, this isn't right, I've really got to let them know about Boris and you and your ankle is screwed and we really ought to be moving out of here and --"

Oshi lowered her head to Raisa's collarbone, sniffed, one arm around her waist, around the other woman: "I want you," she whispered. Hot and cold all over. Oshi finally
smiled
, a cat-wide grin of teeth and lips pulled back in feral emotion. "I need you."

"You do?" Raisa backed away from her. "Look, hey, no. Look, I don't know you. This is really sudden. I've got things to do."

Oshi paused, shook her head, clearing disturbing images from before her eyes. "Really?"

"Not --" Raisa paused. "Not that there's anyone else. But. You're injured and I've got to tell them Boris --" she shrugged uncomfortably. "Maybe we should talk later."

"Maybe." They locked gazes: Oshi, predatory and clear-eyed, Raisa cross-focussed and wary.
Why am I doing this?
Oshi wondered. She felt incredibly, devestatingly alive -- alive everywhere. "Maybe," Oshi repeated.

"I've got to go now," Raisa said hurriedly. "Don't go anywhere: I'll

be right back."

Before Oshi had time to say anything she ducked through a doorway. The lock clicked mechanically behind her. Oshi stared at it in surprised speculation.
Too fast, too fast. What am I doing?
It was like the time back on Miramor Dubrovnic, everything compressed into a screaming hole of emotions. The rest of the Dream Team gathering round afterwords, comforting ... Eri, bless her, trying to help. But nothing would make up for Ivan, may his grave stay undisturbed. (Remembering: the ragged limbs, grey and stringy with decay, nailed up alongside the stretch of urban motorway that curled like a tentacle as it entered the city. Bits and pieces of losers proclaimed treasonable beyond a shadow of a doubt, the ideology of the victors a sinister clownish lunacy.)

Oshi lay down again and tried to think. Things turned sour on her. The air against her skin was cooling and she could feel the scratch-marks along her ribs beginning to burn.
What have I set loose in my head?
She stared blankly at the ceiling, feeling nothing but loss.
It's not normal for me.Why did she make me feel that way --

Hello Oshi. You forgot I was in here, did you?

There's a lot that you've conveniently forgotten. Like the witnesses to your crimes, the insanity of your loves, and the horror to which you sold your soul half a lifetime ago. But I'm not going to let you forget about that, Oshi. You know what? I want you to remember. I am your Boss -- as much of me as will fit in your crampled implants -- and you'd better not forget me.

Even in your sleep.

The geometry of the Dreamtime is not intuitively obvious. Time flows at different rates in different domains of the sim-world, and the domains are separated by gulfs of light years. Most communications between the domains take place in the form of data packets transmitted by comlaser, acknowledged and decoded like the packets transmitted between your implants and the upload receivers, or between the clients and servers on any archaic computer network.

There are many levels to the network. At the bottom are the dumb, unintelligent Gatecoder modules that endlessly send and receive checksum data, telling one another that they still exist. The next level up is environment data: common history transferred between the domains, to ensure that their realities are synchronized and that they appear to obey the same (virtual) physical laws. Then above that level, there are the people-transmissions. People are complex; not just data, but entities that can modify their surroundings, even modify the Gatecoder. People are human, or Superbright, and maybe even Ultrabright. You don't take risks when transmitting people between Gatecoders plugged into different Dreamtime domains. If they didn't come through okay, people would cease to travel and the whole sphere of interstellar commerce would fall apart. It would be a new dark age. So you send people through as data in labelled packets, passing return receipts; if you don't get a receipt you resend the packet, buffering it in memory until you know for sure that the traveller has gotten through. It slows things down, of course, but it saves lives. And this is the way you travelled to get here.

But sometimes when the need is great, unacknowledged packets are transmitted; broadcast packets with no receipt, and no buffering. And these must be received and decoded immediately by
any
gatecoder in their path. It is a fundamental law, but Anubis appears to have forgotten it. Certainly when he learned why the pathfinders had beamed themselves out blindly, he refused to download the entire civilization that followed them. And so, it follows that Anubis is a rogue and a pariah.

Your mission, which you chose to accept, was open ended. Now it requires you to kill Anubis. Then you must implement a defense of this star system against the attack that is coming. I will be watching you in your dreams, Oshi. Don't try to evade me -- I am here in your skull and I can see everything you do.

Good luck in your mission. You're going to need it.

Raisa returned about an hour later. She slipped through the door while Oshi was dozing. Oshi opened her eyes instantly, but gave no sign of being awake. "Can you hear me?" Raisa asked softly.

"I hear you." Oshi abandoned her sleeping subterfuge. She blinked, trying to clear the strands of disturbing dreams from her head. "What's going on?" She hadn't intended to sleep; but after shrugging on a loose robe exhaustion had dulled the edge of her anxiety, until the temptation to lie back and close her eyes had become too much. Not that she was safe -- but if she wasn't, there was precious little that she could do to modify her condition.

"We found Boris. He's safe. I -- we owe you for rescuing him. Nobody's ever gotten out of the axial redoubt before -- not by force." Oshi rolled over and opened her eyes. Raisa looked concerned, but not afraid. "Got someone wants to talk to you."

"That's okay. You -- what's your position here?"

"I'm your minder." Raisa leaned against the far wall. "Looks like I met you first so I'm responsible." She didn't seem to like the idea. "Hence the security. Anubis is unhappy."

"This visitor. Who is it?"

"Guy called Mik." Oshi sat up. Raisa's expression --
you don't like him, do you?
she decided. "A specialist. In case we ran into trouble," she added ingenuously.

"I see."

"You will." Raisa opened the door. "Come in."

Mik was short, bullet-headed, clad in scuffed overalls with too many odd pockets. He carried a case that bulged with odd protruberances. He matched it; time-worn and tough. "Boris says you know how to use a killing stick," he said conversationally.

"What's it to you?" asked Oshi.

"Business. You got out of the axis tube. I'd like to know how."

"Uh-huh."

He sat down and opened his bag. A small tripod of black metal he set on top of the table; its top glowed a dim red. "The axial tube is crucial to the security of the colony. It's the only way into the end-wall industrial areas, the ship docking bays, and the hardened infodumps that buffer Dreamtime communications between here and Pascal. It's also the only part of the colony that's radiation-proofed for anything up to a major solar flare and airproofed against a level six or better meteor impact. Anubis has turned it into a baroque fortress, but it's effective for all that. If you can tell me how you escaped --"

"Ack." Oshi cleared her throat. "Any chance of something to drink?" she added, pointedly glancing at Raisa.

Raisa swallowed whatever protest she'd been about to come out with and went next door.

"I'll tell you," Oshi said, "on condition you tell me why you want to know."

Mik grinned at her unsympathetically. "Do you want to leave this room?" he asked.

"You have a point." Oshi struggled to keep from showing her temper. "And your psywar instructors will have told you that a cooperative informer is worth a hundred coercive sources ..."

"Psywar? What's that?"

Save me from amateurs
, Oshi thought fervently.

"Just kidding," he added. There was no humour in his voice.
No, not an amateur. A
joker: the killing kind.

"I'll bet you were." Oshi looked away as Raisa came back in.

"Just a minute." Mik caught her arm. He was strong; for a moment Oshi considered trying to break his grip, then realised to her chagrin that she was probably too weak to follow through. "Just stop playing around, Oshi Adjani, whoever you are. This is a matter of deepest importance to us. You'd better understand that. Lives are at stake and if you get in our way --"

"My life's on the line too," she said, staring hard at him. He turned and looked at her with mild, disinterested eyes that seemed to go right through her. "Right you are. Let's talk."

"Ack." Mik let go of her hand and she caught the beaker that Raisa offered her and gulped at it thirstily. Cold water numbed the back of her throat. "I was abducted by the Goon Squad. You logged that? They took me to a funicular of some kind, half-bioengineered by the look of it. I blacked out on the way -- one of them used a choke hold -- and at the top I went, let's see ..."

For the next three hours Mik took her through every step she'd made, from entering the vestibule to reaching it again. Raisa was a silent presence, occasionally bringing in a pitcher of water and once a bowl of noodles. Oshi racked her brain for every twist and turn. Her implants came in handy, recording with idiot pedantry every footstep she'd taken. Mik in turn recorded her directions in a primitive visualiser, until the three-space volume that represented the redoubt was blue with the squiggles of her wandering.

"Well, it doesn't look as if you went far," he said at the end of it. "The castle is huge. You got further in than anyone else we've had a chance to talk to, but there are big areas unaccounted for."

"What do you think is up there?" asked Raisa.

"Hard to tell." Mik looked right through her. "After they took Vorontsev, three years ago --" Raisa turned away. "We think Anubis rebuilt the interior," he added quietly. "It's a puzzle palace."

"A lethal one," said Oshi.

"He's insane," whispered Raisa. Louder: "Totally headfucked!"

"Well, yes, but calling him names isn't going to bring back the dead," said Mik. "Dead is dead, as my old mam used to say, and it's up to us to stay warm as long as we can. No use crying over split bones. Which leaves me wondering just how much use you're going to be," he added, nodding at Oshi.

Oshi tensed. "Knives can slip in hands that don't bother to learn how to use them."

Mik smiled humourlessly. "Very good. Have you ever killed anyone?"

Oshi didn't answer. She just looked at him, and after a moment his smile faded. "I see." He looked as if he'd trodden in something nasty and only just realised. Oshi was not about to let him off the hook.

"There are worse things," she said quietly. "I've seen some of them. I
know
. That's why they sent me here."

"Who sent you?"

"The -- people -- who sent Anubis here before me. A consortium of Superbrights, sometimes known as Distant Intervention. Meddlers in human destiny. They know they made a mistake with the dog-head. I am their answer."

"Then you'd better be one that works," he said. "Otherwise ..."

Raisa butted in. "She's in a bad state, Mik. Exposure, leg injuries, some metabolic disorders. You'd better give her some breathing time or she's not going to be a solution to anything."

Mik reached down into his bag and rummaged around. "Here." He pulled out a grapefruit-sized ball and tossed it to her. Raisa caught it and spun it around in her fingertips, looking slightly puzzled.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Support environment for the tapeworm," he said. "The mark one model. Deliver it to Joshua."

Raisa put it down so fast she nearly dropped it, as if it had caught fire between her fingertips. "Shit!"

Oshi focussed on the sphere, jacked her eyes down into odd frequencies, and told her implants run fourier transforms on what they saw. "You've gone to a lot of trouble to keep whatever's in there secure," she said. "Biological weapon? Or grow-in-the-dark nanomachinery?"

"Go figure." He stared at Raisa. "You agreed to be the go-between, didn't you?"

"But I --" Raisa looked acutely uncomfortable. "Has Boris cleared this?"

"Not only has he cleared it, it's essential we do it right now." Mik reached out and picked up the ball and held it out to her. "You know what to do," he said gently. "Now go to it."

Raisa looked sick. "I'll --" whatever she was going to say, she thought better of it. "Yes." She left the room. An outer door slammed behind her moments later.

"What was that about?" asked Oshi. "Someone you don't like?"

"Joshua is schizophrenic: a neuroreceptor deficit in some pathway or other. He hears voices, doesn't have much of a sense of identity. He won't cooperate with any medical work, even though his condition is curable. We think he talks to Anubis too much. She delivers his food. She's too soft; she doesn't want anything to do with it."

"Sounds serious."

Mik suddenly looked haggard. "It's a gamble," he admitted. "It could take out every life-form in the colony. If we can't take the axial redoubt --"

"You came equipped for this." Oshi stood up unsteadily, feeling a stab of pain from her twisted ankle. "You needed to learn everything about the castle and you decided to release it -- what, a biological weapon? -- then and there? It's a coup."

"The decision was already taken." Mik was suddenly between her and the door. There was something bear-like about his stance, and a frightening vacancy in his expression. Oshi had seen it too many times before: that distance in the gaze, the disengagement from humanity. "Nobody is going to get in the way."