Shooting the Rift - eARC (31 page)

As we approached the pressure hatch I’d passed through before, I glanced quickly at the guards on duty, finding, to my relief, that neither of them was Jas. I was never going to see her again, that much was certain, and I didn’t want my last memories of her to be tainted with the embarrassment of being brought together again under these circumstances.

The rest of the journey was made in silence; I didn’t feel much like talking, and Wymes seemed content to let me brood for a while, no doubt hoping that it would soften me up. In fact he didn’t speak again until I was standing in my new cell, looking around at the spartan furnishings.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he said sarcastically.

“Cozy.” I walked the three paces from the door to the bed, and dropped my kitbag on it. “Interesting decor. Minimalism still fashionable in the League, is it?”

“Glad you like it. Because if it’s up to me, you’ll be in here till they take you out and shoot you.” He paused for a moment, waiting for a reaction I was damned if I was going to give him the satisfaction of. “Unless you decide to cooperate.”

“I’d be happy to.” I sat down on the narrow bunk, finding it a little more comfortable than I’d expected; which, as I’d expected the mattress to feel like a bag of rocks, still wasn’t saying much. “But I don’t know what else I can tell you. Last time we had this conversation, you said you weren’t interested.”

“Not in the sacrificial data you knew we’d know already.” Wymes nodded thoughtfully. “Smart move, by the way. I really had written you off as a small-time chancer after that, until Captain Remington started putting two and two together.” He leaned casually against the door jamb, silently challenging me to try and get past him, but I had more sense than to rise to the bait. With his tweaked strength and reflexes he’d be more than a match for me, although my fighting skills might take him by surprise just long enough to give me an edge. Even if it did, though, the place was swarming with troopers, who’d bring me down long before I made it to the first security door—which I wouldn’t be able to open in any case. All I’d succeed in doing by making the attempt would be to remind him that there was more to me than appeared on the surface, and I wanted to divert his attention from the physical side of that at least. Why play your cards face up, as Jas had once put it.

“Shame he made five,” I said.

“I don’t think he did,” Wymes said matter-of-factly. “I think he was right on the money with everything he deduced. I think Jenny Worricker put you on that contract-bender’s barge to gather intelligence for her, and set you up with a handler on Numarkut you could channel it back to her through. And when you found you had a cargo for a League world, you thought you could really go to work.” He paused again for effect, a habit I was already beginning to detest. “What do you think?”

“I think I’m as insulted by the phrase ‘contract-bender’ as any other Guilder would be, and you ought to apologize for using it,” I said. To be honest I couldn’t have cared less, but I knew it was a disparaging term common among non-Guild freighter crews, and anyone using it in a dockside tavern had better be as quick with their fists as they were with their tongue. If I was going to carry on playing the affronted innocent, I’d better be seen to react to it in a typically Guilderlike fashion: so I got slowly to my feet, clenching my fists. I paused. “Still waiting,” I said.

I never even saw him coming: suddenly something slammed into my midriff, and my face met a rising knee. Fortunately, even winded, my reflexes cut in, letting me ride the blow to some extent, or he’d undoubtedly have broken my nose. As it was, it started bleeding so copiously he probably thought he had anyway. I collapsed back onto the bed behind me, and, to add insult to injury, cracked the back of my head against the wall. The biomonitor kicked into life, assuring me none of the damage was serious, so I ignored it in favor of the light show sparking and fizzing on the back of my retina.

Before my vision had time to clear Wymes was on me again, in a blur of motion, grabbing the front of my shirt and hauling me to my feet as effortlessly as I’d have lifted the pillow.

“You’re not a Guilder, and I don’t have to take that shit from you. Do we understand one another now?”

“We do.” I nodded, still gauging his strength, which I’d underestimated as much as his speed. He could probably hold his own against Rolf, let alone me. “But you just made a big mistake.” I had to regain the initiative now, or it would all be over; letting him gain the upper hand would be tantamount to admitting my guilt. “Two, in fact.”

“Which are?” He didn’t sound all that concerned, but I’d been to enough Avalonian cotillions to know underlying uncertainty when I heard it.

“My neuroware’s recorded this assault, and I’ll be relaying it to my advocate as soon as she visits. Who’ll enter it as evidence at my appeal hearing.” I twisted my features into a smug grin, which I was pretty sure would get under his skin. “Where we’ll see how much the Grand Mistress appreciates your choice of language.”

“And the second?” He did a pretty good job of appearing unconcerned, I’ll give him that. He even shook me a little, to emphasize how in control he was—which he wouldn’t have had to do if he really had been.

“You’ve just doubled the price of any information I do have that you might want,” I told him.

CHAPTER THIRTY

In which an unexpected visitor makes a tempting proposition.

After that there was nowhere for the conversation to go, apart from a litany of half-hearted threats on his part, and increasingly snide comments on mine, so Wymes finally left me alone to drip blood on the sheets and brood. No doubt he was hoping that the chance to assess my position undisturbed would leave me dispirited, and I have to admit he wasn’t wrong about that. From where I was sitting, it looked pretty dire, with only the remote possibility that Clio could somehow prevail on the local Guildhall standing between me and a firing squad.

Before they hauled me out to shoot me, though, Wymes would want to wring me dry of all the information he believed I possessed, and that clearly wasn’t going to be pleasant. He’d already shown he was willing to get physical if he thought that would help, but I didn’t imagine for one moment that he’d resort to methods that crude when there were plenty of other, more subtle, ones to hand. For one thing there was my ability to record everything that happened for posterity, which I was certain being reminded of had rattled him, however much he’d tried to hide it; there was still a remote possibility that my Guild protection would be restored, and if that happened he’d be held accountable for every step he took over the line. And, for another, simply battering the information he wanted out of me would be unreliable at best—we both knew I’d say pretty much anything to avoid that, whether it was true or not, and he, or his associates, would have to waste an inordinate amount of time verifying everything he got that way. It was far more likely they’d use some biotech glop to mess with my brain chemistry, twisting my perceptions to the point where I’d happily tell them everything I knew because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The other possibility, I really didn’t want to think about. Leaguers might have some weird cultural prejudice against neuroware, but they understood how it worked right enough, and their data nodes were just as compatible with it as anyone else’s—as I’d recently found out for myself. It wouldn’t take much to do in reverse what I’d done to gain access to their node, and strip-mine my ‘ware for every last scrap of information it contained. If I was lucky, that would be no more harmful than meshing-in normally—but if I wasn’t, the results could be dire, ripping enough holes in my neural network to leave me a drooling vegetable.

Then there was Mother and Tinkie to think about, potential casualties of the League’s covert invasion of Rockhall. At the moment, it seemed, I was the only one able or willing to warn the Commonwealth that it was coming: although quite how I was going to manage that under the circumstances I didn’t have a clue.

Such cheerful thoughts kept me occupied for several hours, which I tried to while away by running recreational ‘ware, or taking a more detailed look at the data I’d swiped, although neither held my attention for as long as I’d hoped. I wasn’t in the mood for taking refuge in virts, and there didn’t seem much point in reviewing something the League would delete as soon as they managed to force their way into my head.

All of which meant I was at a pretty low ebb when the lock on the door disengaged, hardly bothering to raise my head as it was pushed open from the other side. Then I realized who it was, and jumped to my feet in astonishment.

“Jas! What are you doing here?”

“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” She looked at me quizzically, taking in my appearance, which, despite a wash after Wymes’s departure, was still more than a little rumpled. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” I said. There was no point talking about it now; she was hardly likely to report him even if I did go into the gory details. I waved a hand at the bunk. “Can I offer you a seat?”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.” She grinned, and accepted the invitation. I followed, settling next to her, feeling faintly uncomfortable. All right, fair enough, there was nowhere else to sit, but it was still a bed after all, and the subtext wasn’t exactly lost on either of us.

“Only the cute ones,” I said, returning the smile. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me either; for the first time since we’d met we were free to flirt openly, away from the prying eyes of her squad mates and my fellow internees, and all I’d had to do to make it possible was get myself thrown in jail.

“We need to talk, Si.” I’d never seen her eyes so close and clear, and they drew me in, until the rest of her face seemed to fill my entire field of vision. “You’re in serious trouble.”

“I believe I am,” I said, although I wasn’t entirely sure I was talking about my arrest any more. I could feel the warmth of her body, radiating against my own, a tingling precursor of the physical contact my imagination kept foreshadowing, despite my best efforts to concentrate on the grim realities of my precarious situation.

“I’m serious.” She pulled away a little, and I found myself a bit more able to concentrate on her words. “Are you really a Commonwealth spy?”

“Everyone seems to think so,” I said, finding myself curiously reluctant to lie to her outright. “But if I am, I’m obviously not a very good one.”

“Don’t play games, Si. Not with me.” She shrugged, which had an interesting effect on her embonpoint. Though the body armor I’d usually seen her in had done it few favors, she had quite a full figure, which even the standard-issue fatigues she was wearing couldn’t entirely conceal. “I’m the closest thing you’ve got here to a friend.”

“Which is why they sent you in here to talk to me, isn’t it?” I asked, facing the realization I’d been shoving to the back of my head since she walked through the door.

“Of course it is,” she said briskly, “and before you ask, of course we’re being monitored.”

“I knew that already,” I said. I could detect the datastream from the handheld in her pocket, and poked at it from force of habit, but the genetic code lock kept me out as effectively as ever.

“Of course you did,” she agreed, a simple statement, devoid of sarcasm or judgment.

“Good.” I felt vaguely wrong-footed. “So is this just a social call, or . . .” I cocked my head interrogatively, reluctant to put what I was certain her real purpose was into words. It could hardly have escaped Wymes’s notice, or at least the people he worked for, that the two of us had hit it off, and leverage like that would be too good not to exploit. However she felt about me, though, Jas was a League soldier first and foremost: she’d already proved that by reporting my family connection to the Commonwealth navy to her superiors as soon as I let it slip, and that was the side she’d come down on if her loyalties were divided.

“They asked me to come see you,” she admitted, then hesitated. “But I would have tried anyway.” I found myself believing her. “I really don’t want to see you executed.”

“Neither do I. But it won’t come to that,” I assured her, wishing I was as certain about that as I sounded. “Clio will get the Guild back on side.”

“And if she doesn’t?” Jas asked, in a tone which somehow managed to substitute “when” for “if.”

“I’ll still be okay,” I said, blithely, “as soon as that idiot Wymes realizes I’m not really a spy.”

“Not much of a plan, is it?” she asked, and I shook my head in rueful acknowledgement.

“Only one I’ve got, though.”

“Then get a better one,” Jas urged. “While you still can.”

“Which would be?” I asked, pretty sure I already knew the answer.

“Defect,” Jas said. “You don’t owe the Commonwealth anything, you said so yourself, and now the Guild have cut you off at the knees too. But there’ll always be a place in the League for people with your talents.”

“There will?” I asked. I’d been anticipating an appeal to co-operate in exchange for a life sentence instead of a firing squad, but this substantially raised the stakes. Simply turning my coat hadn’t even occurred to me.

“Definitely.” She nodded. “There’s a deal on the table, as a Guilder would say, and you’ve got twelve hours to think it over. After that, the interrogators make a start on you. Believe me, you don’t want that to happen.”

“What kind of a deal?” I asked, intrigued in spite of myself.

“Immunity. League citizenship. Enough of a stipend to live on, if you don’t spend too lavishly.” She grinned. “And an ensign’s commission, if you still want to put on a Navy uniform. Working on intelligence analysis.”

“It’s tempting,” I hedged, while the realization slowly sunk in that I could get out of this. Easily. All I had to do was betray Mother and Tinkie, and live with that on my conscience if they died as a result. “Anything else?”

“Only this.” She leaned across and kissed me, long and slow, and I found myself responding in kind, our tongues tangling, while my biomonitor went quietly crazy trying to classify her range of transgenic tweaks in terms it understood. The contrast with Carenza’s drunken fumblings could hardly have been more marked, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I rather lost track of the time for a few moments. As our bodies touched, yielding against one another, I found the reality of the contact far exceeded anything I could have imagined.

“Quite an incentive,” I agreed, as we finally came up for air.

“I’m not saying it would be easy,” she cautioned, moving away a few inches, “but at least we’d have a chance to be together for a while. See how we get on when we can behave like normal people.”

“I’d like that,” I admitted.

“So would I.” She stood, with what I hoped was genuine reluctance, and headed for the door. “Think about it. Do the right thing.”

“I will,” I said, wondering what the right thing was. She reached into her pocket, triggering the locking code from her handheld, which I recorded out of habit. The datastream seemed strangely clear all of a sudden, no more complex than Plubek’s had been, and sudden understanding punched me in the sternum, almost as hard as Wymes had done. Our little game of tonsil hockey had given me access to her genetic code, through the biomonitor I’d barely noticed activating in the heat of the moment, and I could use that to crack her handheld, or anything encoded by it. If I was quick enough . . .

“Be seeing you,” she said, pausing in the doorway for a final glance back in my direction. “I hope.”

“Me too.” I said, smiling, and gazing into her eyes, playing for time as I frantically stripped out datanomes from the sequence I'd constructed to get into Plubek's handheld, and melded what was left with the strips of her genecode my biomonitor had recorded. It was a long shot at best, I reminded myself, but it was the only one I had . . .

Jas turned away, and the door thunked to behind her. I could still detect the compacted datacloud around her handheld, however, and, crossing my fingers, tried meshing into it, sneaking in along the pulse she triggered to relock the door. To my surprise and relief it worked, and I suddenly found myself with full access, and the weird sensation of having stumbled through a door I'd just leaned on expecting it to be barred on the other side.

There was no time to explore all the data encoded there, so I simply grabbed whatever was immediately adjacent, and dumped it into my ‘sphere.

Only to find I’d hit the jackpot: locking codes for all the areas of the base Jas was authorized to enter. Which was, of course, by no means all of it, some sections remaining classified well above a Naval Infantry private’s clearance level, but since her right of access included my cell, more than good enough for me.

Of course, even if I could open the door whenever I felt like it, that wouldn’t get me very far. I needed a proper plan of action if I was going to get out of here, and find some way of warning the Commonwealth of the impending invasion of Rockhall.

But I had a map of the base, and a fighting chance at last. I sat on the bed, and started to work something out, trying not to wonder if I should just take Jas up on her offer instead.