Lament for the Fallen (33 page)

Joshua clenches his fists, kneading them against the firmness of the sofa.

‘Oktar Samboa left the negotiations – left Samara – and met with this woman. He hadn’t seen her in months. She was very excited. He had promised her that she would accompany him to space. They – it would be too gracious to say they made love – they had sex. Then they went in search of narcotics.’

Nizena looks with distaste at the stone of the floor. ‘They visited a series of bars, drinking heavily, before settling in one in Anacostia. They found a group of men who would sell them something called Sutra. They were policemen who had arrived to sell a large consignment. Oktar and his friend left. Samara must have arrived a few minutes later.

‘From the images in her memory we were able to identify a few people in the bar. We were looking for the men Samara was fighting with. Witnesses told us they’d seen one of the policemen shoot Samara.’

They sit silently for a few moments.

‘It took more time. Too long. We found the policemen. Fodiar, who you met, interviewed them himself. He retrieved their memories.’

Joshua stirs. ‘How do you do that? See into someone’s mind?’

Nizena shakes his head. ‘It is not a pleasant procedure, but some, like Dondé Hélène or the Nine, can push their symbiont into others’ minds. They can control them or, in this case, recover past events.

‘We believe, now, that we know what happened before Samara was sent to Tartarus.

‘When Samara asked the policemen if they had seen Oktar, they panicked, assuming he was there to investigate them. Samara was surprised by what looks like a random attack, and they took advantage. One of them shot him in the head.

‘They assumed – correctly as it happens – that murdering an Achenian might attract too much attention for them to manage. They decided to hide what they thought was his body by sentencing him to solitary confinement in one of the high-security jails. They manufactured witnesses, filed their own statement. They created an entire story from scratch. The court is automated, a simplified machine intelligence. Easy to manipulate. Samara had only an automated representative.’

‘And his ears?’ asks Joshua.

A look of pain for Nizena. ‘One of the policemen is a psychopath. Decided he wanted a souvenir of the Achenian he had killed and cut them off with a pocketknife. He had no idea that this would hide Samara.

‘Samara was declared a murderer and a danger to society, but the record we found didn’t specify where he would be sent. It seems it is left in the hands of some dispatcher and is completely random. It is barbaric, but their system assumes that anyone sentenced to these special prisons is never coming out and so there is no need to know where they are.’

Joshua looks appalled. Nizena, having lived with the search, looks drained.

‘Getting this far took us over a month. Fodiar and his team have been looking through the various prisons for him. There are almost two million prisoners in solitary confinement in lights-out institutions with no human operators. We had to collate so much information, get prison officials to go into these places and send us images of their charges.

‘All we could do is search and hope for the best. The Nine have been ready to move the moment we knew where he could be. When you entered the exclusion zone around the elevator, they scrambled.’

Joshua has stopped eating.

‘Samara’s suffering, it has no meaning?’ he asks.

‘Yes and no,’ says Nizena. ‘The Americans are horrified at how easy their justice system is to manipulate. They say so, anyway. Some of the tragedies we revealed hidden in so many cells,’ he sighs. ‘Many cases are being reinvestigated. Their systems are slow, and much is going to have to be done by hand. It will take a long time, but some will find justice. If they don’t lose interest after we have left. The policemen have been apprehended, although that feels a scant victory.’

Joshua is overcome with exhaustion. The unfairness is overwhelming.

‘Rest now, we will talk again in the morning,’ and, as Joshua’s eyes close, Nizena shifts his thoughts, raising him into the air and settling him gently on the bed in the guest room. The air shimmers and glass encloses him in privacy.

Joshua sleeps.

42

‘I’ve spoken with Ortega,’ says Hollis.

‘He must be relieved.’ Nizena does not sound as if he is overly concerned about the American president’s state of being.

The two are walking along Lake Samudra’s shore. Lights from the cliff-city of Tswalu glow gently in the distance on either side of them.

They began as rivals. When Nizena was building the infrastructure for the new city, Hollis was writing the rules that would govern it. Nizena had been convinced that Hollis was attempting to bring the worst of Earth’s laws to space. Hollis had been just as certain that Nizena refused to understand the dangers of his new technology.

Both learned and mellowed. Sometimes all that is needed for opponents to become friends is the time to see the outcomes of their ambitions. A chance realization that neither appreciates the Achenian fashion for projecting their symbiotic intelligences as visible companions had cemented their rapport.

They have been friends for well over a century.

‘You must be more relieved,’ says Hollis, her gender fluidly transforming. He grips Nizena’s shoulder. ‘To lose Samara as well would be cruel.’

When Hollis was a child, and even with the sophistication of transitional biology, he struggled with the notion of having to pick a persistent gender. The development of the symbionts brought him and a small number of other Achenians a longed-for and whimsical freedom to change gender at will.

Light ripples on the water. Nizena knows it is not the real moon, but he enjoys the tranquillity it brings to the nights. The stars are those viewable from outside. Achenia maintains its Earth day–night and seasonal cycle, but the night sky will always be that of the universe as they travel.

A nightjar calls in the woods. The sound haunting and beautiful beneath the trees.

‘Thank you,’ says Nizena. ‘I know how much you have all put in to keep the Americans engaged.’

‘They’re certainly not pleased to learn that their treasured justice system and most popular jail are a tad broken. They’ve also asked us to keep quiet about Samara escaping from it.’

Nizena laughs. ‘Because just anyone can fall 35,000 kilometres in an escape pod, open to space, and survive? Who do they wish to fool?’

‘No, not like that. They’re more worried that their people will find out that the Nine can.’ He is smiling, too. ‘I agree. It’s silly, but we’re leaving, and we can keep the events of the last few weeks to ourselves. Ortega wants to win re-election.’

‘Before their economy falls apart again?’

‘Oktar’s final joke on them? No, I don’t believe it will be that bad. They’ve survived worse.’

Nizena takes off his shoes and stands with his feet in the water. He likes to wiggle his toes and feel the sand between them.

‘I hear you’ve received another spurt from Ullianne,’ says Hollis. He looks for a place to sit on a nearby log. Nizena can be a while once he gets his feet into the lake.

‘It’s about a year old. She says they are a third of the way to Gliese now. The transmitters they fire are taking longer and longer to reach us.’

The Allegro quantum navigation team is the furthest out. They have an early version of the faster-than-light system that Nizena and a group of other engineers have been working on. Ullianne Vijayarao promised to send back reports as to how they are getting on.

There are three stars in the Gliese system, all red dwarfs and smaller and colder than Earth’s sun. There are, however, numerous potentially habitable planets in the system, and it has become the first waypoint on various planned tours of the galaxy.

Allegro is small, only 250 people on the ship, and they have promised to join Achenia at Gliese. Ullianne, though, is determined to get there first. She and Nizena have made a bet. She believes that older technology and an eighty-year head start will give her victory. Nizena hopes that his refinements will allow him to pass her. Last one there buys the other lunch every day. For one hundred years.

They have agreed, in the interests of each other’s sanity, that they do not need to have those lunches together, whoever wins.

‘You think that drive of yours will really work? Spending two hundred years getting to Gliese will be, perhaps, dull if it doesn’t.’

Nizena grins. ‘Would you like another lecture on the difficulty of doing this?’

‘Please, no,’ says Hollis, laughing. ‘You put me to sleep for a month the last time.’

‘Well then, you’ll find out like the rest of us.’

A wolf howls somewhere in the hills above the lake, insects chirp, and two old friends – one up to his knees in the moonlit waters of the lake – stroll along the shore, laughter floating in the glittering night.

43

‘Has the president heard?’

‘Yes, Ma’am. Alvarez let me know,’ says Major Jim Dervish, his exhaustion present in his yellow and bloodied eyes and the grey and limp flesh of his face. He rubs nervously at the dwindling hair on his head.

He has spent an unsleeping month slumped inside his workstation, along with the rest of his team. Their single task was to find Samara before the Achenians in the hope of salvaging the Watchers’ reputation. Losing him has been humiliating, and they know that President Ortega will want a sacrificial token to redeem himself with the public should this story become unreasonably popular.

General Marilyn Graham deliberately slams her console on to her desk in the hope it will break. It does not, and she flings it across the room in disgust. A tiny cleaning drone scuttles across the floor to retrieve it. She scowls and stomps from behind the desk and over to the windows, kicking the drone as she passes. It rolls back and forth, righting itself, and restores the console to the desk.

Graham’s office is at the apex of the glass crest on the north end of the complex. It is stark: a clean white desk and white walls with no adornment or personal images.

Graham looks out across ten acres of parkland to the glass wall on the other side, seeing nothing but her own disappointment.

New Pentagon is formed like a crown of water rising in response to a stone dropped into a still pond. Glass ripples flow back behind the central ring mimicking the original structure, but the name jars with its shape: tradition winning over form.

She hates this building. Too much glass, too bright, too open. More than forty-five thousand personnel, almost a tenth of the US Armed Forces, work here. The two divisions of the modern military – the Watchers and the Operators – are about secrets and shadows, not this facade of transparency.

‘I can’t think here. Let’s go walk in the Meadow,’ she says, tramping to the hall elevators. Dervish follows.

Graham grips the bar on the inside of the glass, her back to Dervish as she stares outside, unconsciously grinding her teeth. They pass underground, and the sunlight gives way to the muted white of the light paint of the lower floors.

‘I’m sorry, Ma’am,’ says Dervish, filling the silence. His body is gaunt and angular. There is little need for physical excellence from an army that trains and operates in virtual environments.

Graham says nothing as they drop through the levels of the old Pentagon. Bright halls filled with clusters of seated people, their bodies wrapped inside their workstations. The Watchers fill these offices, analysing the continuous deluge of data coming from the Earth-side connect. Their role is to hunt for threats to the state, monitor those targets of interest and guide the Operators who carry out interventions and operations.

Dervish’s team has been trying to get ahead of the Achenians in logging images of prisoners. They have struggled to get people inside the automated lockdown environments. Too much of their capacity has been dedicated to monitoring social chatter to assess public response to Achenia’s independence. Most people seem indifferent, but then the full economic impact will not hit until months after they leave.

‘Have you told them?’ gesturing at the passing levels.

‘Yes, Ma’am. They’re disappointed. I’ve asked Camberwell to conduct a review of what—’

‘We know what went fucking wrong,’ she says, her voice a jagged growl. ‘The fucking Achenians can block us, and those fucking fuckers at Justice have so thoroughly fucked up their fucking systems that the most effective way for anyone to evade the Watchers is to get fucking arrested.’

Dervish, within the confines of the elevator, steps back. His armpits are rank. When Graham starts swearing incoherently, someone is about to be crucified.

The Armed Forces watch and are watched in return. Their failures can be acutely public.

She closes her eyes and breathes deeply, squeezing the air out through her teeth. Her fading brown hair tangles over her eyes. She brushes it back with one sweaty hand. Stubby fingers and painfully short nails.

‘How did he get out of US territory without us spotting him, Jim?’ Her hands are leaving wet imprints on the bar.

‘He was never here, Ma’am,’ says Dervish. ‘He was sent to Tartarus.’

Dervish has never killed anyone directly. Before his transfer to the Watchers he served thirty years in the peculiar world of the Operators, logging over twenty thousand hours in simulated conflict environments. Months at a time with the nutrient and narcotic broth piped to the shunt in his gut, persistently hyper-awake inside his workstation. He flew drone missions all over the world, led attacks against remote terrorists and home-grown prepper militia.

The world is a complex place, many regions devastated by environmental catastrophe or still reeling from the collapse of resource extraction and the consequences of the orbital war. There are always those who will strike at the light created by others and, sometimes, the only way to defend is to attack first.