No Direction Home (17 page)

‘Exactly.'

‘There's still a risk, though?'

‘I'd be lying if I said there wasn't, but we're probably not going to get another chance of talking face to face in private – Ferreira's going to wonder about this meeting as it is, so we can't make a habit of it – so, apart from that, it's the only way we've got of communicating with each other without being monitored.' He shrugged. ‘Assuming you want to communicate with me, that is.'

‘True. How do I switch the mode off?'

‘Subvocalise “Proserpina”.' He gave a wry grimace. ‘Whoever thought these up wasn't exactly using their imagination much.'

‘OK,' she said, nodding slowly. ‘I'll give it a go.'

‘Thanks.' He stared distantly down at the table top, then said briskly, ‘OK, we'd better sort out what we've been talking about for when Ferreira asks us.'

‘OK,' she said, absently, then seemed to hesitate, evidently about to say something but not quite sure how to phrase it – or even to say it at all.

‘Yes?' he asked, gently, prompting her.

She stared at him, then nodded slowly. ‘Can I ask you something?'

‘Of course you can. I don't guarantee an answer, though.'

‘Fair enough. That message from your… I don't know what to call him.'

‘The original Vinter, you mean? I kind of call him Vinter Prime, or V-One, in my head.'

She leaned forward to put more wine into his almost empty glass. ‘Is he actually
you
?'

He let out his breath in a long sigh. ‘Phew… starting with the easy ones, are you?' He thought for a moment, staring down at his glass before sipping from it. ‘OK – purely pragmatic answer – no, he isn't. He's on Earth – or was – and I'm not. I'm a construct, really. I've been given a set of memories that have been edited to a greater or lesser extent, but he's – he
was
– at least fifteen years older than I am, never mind the fact that I was never this physically fit when I was in my twenties anyway. According to the records, I'm five centimetres taller than him and I've been made more intelligent, apparently by a fairly significant factor – I know things that he never did. Shit, I even understand calculus now.'

‘And the non-pragmatic answer?'

‘You mean, the essential Vinter – the one in the vid? I don't know. I've got no way of knowing if they've given me all his memories, or if they've changed anything to suit themselves. All I do know is that the memories aren't real – they didn't happen to
me
. I've only been alive for a few weeks, when it comes down to it – everything I remember happened to someone else, to… well, the
real
Chris Vinter. Not to me.'

‘But you still remember them.'

‘Vividly. Only now I've got two sets of memories in my head – the ones given me by New Dawn and the original ones that I should have had all along – and they're just as real in that respect as each other. Well, actually, no they're not, to be honest. The New Dawn memories are nowhere near as detailed as the originals. Now I've got them, I have difficulty understanding how I ever accepted the New Dawn ones as being real, but I suppose that's because I now know how much was missed out. But if you don't know you've got gaps in your memory, how do you question them? How do you realise that there ought to be more detail, more depth to them?'

He paused, staring down at his drink, then continued, ‘In the New Dawn set of memories is a woman called Livvy – well, Olivia, really. I know I – well, Vinter – never knew a Livvy like the one in those memories, but I still remember her as someone who was part of my life for eight years. Only she wasn't… Those memories never happened – but they keep getting in the way.'
Making love to Anji, but with Livvy's face and body intruding because they'd often used the same memory for both sets…
He shook his head, impatiently. ‘And it's all bollocks, because none of it – Livvy, Anji, Emma – ever happened to me anyway. Before I woke up in the Med area, there
was
no me.' He fell silent, staring down at his glass for almost half a minute before he looked up at her, a slow smile crossing his face. ‘Bloody hell… You really are a damn good interrogator, Lieutenant Sondgren.'

She gave a small
moue
of chagrin, as if he had caught her out, then tilted her head forward, acknowledging the compliment. ‘They didn't promote me this far for nothing, sir.'

‘So I see.'

‘I wanted to find out more about you if I'm going to risk my neck for you.'

‘That's fair enough – and quite reassuring, actually.'

‘It's just that… I need to be sure I can trust you.'

‘So you were trying to get beyond the façade?'

‘Something like that.'

‘Well, I think you managed that pretty well.' He shook his head disbelievingly.
Did I really say all that to her?
‘So can you? Trust me, that is.'

She stared thoughtfully at him, then nodded. ‘I think I can, but…' She broke off, waiting for him to pick up the thread.

‘But only if you know I'm not under Ferreira's control, right?'

‘Right.'

‘So, if I can give you that reason to believe?'

She hesitated a moment longer, then nodded. ‘I'll be right behind you.'

*****

‘A word with you, Major Vinter,' said Ferreira curtly, the following morning. ‘In private, please.'

That was quick,
Vinter thought to himself, as he followed Ferreira into his office and was confronted with a still of him outside Kari's quarters that the other man had waiting on his desk comp. ‘Explain.'

Vinter gave him a quizzical look. ‘Explain what?'

‘What you were doing last night with Lieutenant Sondgren. And before you claim it is none of my business, I am going to say that when you and your assistant meet in private, with no record of your conversation, it becomes my business – is that clear?'

‘As crystal. So you want to know what we were talking about? I sent you an e-memo summarising the meeting fifteen minutes ago.'

‘I do have other things on my plate, Vinter.'

‘I can imagine… OK, this was very much a clear the air meeting. We have to work together, but, like you, she trusts me as far as she can throw me, so we had to negotiate some sort of working procedure, make the best of a bad job, that sort of thing.'

‘So why couldn't it be discussed in your office?'

‘What, so that you could listen in? This was a cards on the table discussion –' Seeing the blank expression on Ferreira's face, he continued, ‘A full and frank discussion, OK?'
Nearly slipped up there – that was a TwentyCee expression, the sort that Vinter Prime would use; I'm not supposed to have access to them…
‘She had some pretty blunt statements to make about me – traitor, murderer, betrayer, that sort of thing, but also about you – the kind of things she wouldn't have wanted you to hear.'

‘Like what?'

‘As I said, the kind of things she wouldn't have wanted you to hear.' Vinter stared levelly at Ferreira. ‘And you're not going to – not from me, anyway. But I imagine you can probably guess the general drift of them.' He shrugged. ‘Anyway, it was the kind of discussion you can't have if anyone's listening, especially when a lot of it was about the listener. It needed to be brought out into the open, so we did.'

Ferreira stared levelly at him for several seconds, then said, ‘You were in there for over an hour. Is that all that happened, this “clear the air” discussion?'

Vinter shook his head, chuckling. ‘You mean was I fucking her?' He saw Ferreira visibly recoil at the obscenity; it wasn't the first time that he had shown an unexpected degree of disapproval of coarse language. ‘You must be joking, Colonel. I can't say I'd object, but she sure as hell would – I'm the last person she'd want. No, we were talking about the overall situation, how neither of us was happy with it, but the best way forward was to co-operate.'

‘And she accepted that?'

‘Not immediately, no, but she's a pragmatist when all's said and done and knows damn well that there's nothing either of us can do to change the situation, so we decided to work something out.'

‘Which was?'

Vinter gestured at Ferreira's desktop. ‘It's all in the memo.' Stifling a smile at Ferreira's evident impatience, he continued, ‘Basically, she takes over the day to day running of UNSEC, because none of the Team trust me at all, and reports to me on a daily basis or if anything important comes up. They're keeping me at a distance and I can't say I blame them one little bit.'

‘I'm not sure I like that arrangement.'

Vinter shrugged. ‘It's the best you're going to get, I'm afraid. They really don't want to work for me – actually they don't want to work for you either, but I don't suppose that comes as any surprise – but they'll work for Lieutenant Sondgren. Take it or leave it – if you want any investigation into EarthCorp agents to continue, that's the way it'll have to be.'

Ferreira sighed, then shook his head. ‘I'm still not convinced you've been entirely truthful with me.'

Vinter sighed and shook his head. ‘Do you really think we were concocting some plot to overthrow you – just the two of us, when she wouldn't even trust me with the time of day? What would be the point – all you have to do is use a trigger phrase for Conditioned Debriefing Mode or whatever it's called and I'd have to reveal the plot immediately, wouldn't I?'

‘I may yet decide to do that.'

Vinter shrugged. ‘Go ahead, if it makes you feel better.'
And it would be one way of finding out if he really had escaped Ferreira's control…

Ferreira continued to stare at Vinter for almost half a minute, as if trying to read the truth in his face, before he sat back, shaking his head slowly. ‘This will
not
happen again, you will
not
meet in secret, understood?'

‘In
private
,' Vinter corrected him. ‘It's an inalienable right of the UN constitution, actually.'

‘Understood?' There was an edge of barely controlled anger in Ferreira's voice now.

‘Understood,' Vinter echoed resignedly.

‘I hope so. Very well, Captain. Dismiss.'

Vinter rose to his feet, then paused, as a further thought struck him. ‘Colonel?'

‘What is it?'

‘I've been meaning to ask you this for a while. What happened to Ilona Novaska?'

Ferreira stared blankly at him, taken aback by the sudden change of subject. ‘Who?'

‘Ilona Novaska – the revival specialist that you had arrested during your coup.'

‘How the hell should I know? Why do you want to know?'

‘Because she tried to help me, that's why.'

Ferreira glared at him, then typed in a series of instructions on his deskcomp. He studied the display for several seconds, then said, ‘She went back into the cryosleep chambers a week ago – once we'd finished reviving our own personnel.' He looked quizzically up at Vinter. ‘Did you think I'd had her killed?'

‘I wouldn't put it past you.'

Surprisingly, Ferreira seemed to be genuinely offended by this. ‘I'm not a barbarian, no matter what you think, Vinter. Why would we kill her – to cover up what she knows? Whatever information she had is out of date, now, isn't it? And it will be even less relevant when she is revived at PlanetFall – when we will be needing her skills again, won't we?'

‘And she'll be brainwashed by then in any case, won't she?'

‘I'd rather say re-educated.'

‘Yes, I suppose you would. However, I'd like to see her chamber.'

‘Don't you trust me?'

‘In a word – no.'

Ferreira let out an exasperated sigh. ‘Very well. Her chamber code is GX-13B-21RA.'

*****

GX-13B-21RA.

Vinter stood beside the cryosleep chamber, trying not to compare it to a catafalque; it looked for all the world like a metal coffin, except that there was a transparent partition that gave him a head and shoulders view of the occupant. And, yes, it
was
Ilona Novaska, and according to the readout display, she was as healthy as could be expected from someone who had been frozen to within a few degrees of Absolute Zero and whose metabolism had been slowed right down to a single heartbeat every minute or so. Or, to put it another way, she was still alive and only ageing at about a sixtieth of normal rate; she would only be just over four years older, physically, at PlanetFall than she was now.

Vinter felt himself beginning to relax and it was only then that he realised that, even though he had only mentioned Ilona as a means of distracting Ferreira from thinking too much about the meeting with Kari, he had been genuinely apprehensive about visiting her chamber; he had needed to see for himself that she was safe. He pushed himself away, drifting slowly in the weightless conditions, and looked around, taking in the row upon row of identical chambers that stretched off both before and behind him, as well as above and below. Here, two thousand colonists were in dreamless sleep, and, for most of them, that would last until PlanetFall – provided they arrived there at all.

‘See you in two hundred and fifty years?'

‘Looking forward to it.'

If they were lucky.

Very lucky, the way things are going…

Vinter shook his head at the thought, then tugged gently on his tether to take him back to her chamber – although why they called it a
chamber
was beyond him – a chamber was a room of some sort, for Christ's sake. Although if they'd called it a casket or coffin or whatever, it probably wouldn't have helped… Perhaps ‘chamber' was better – it implied
some
sort of accommodation, if nothing else.