The Dark Imbalance (27 page)

She looked over to Roche on the table and shook her head. “I’m not entirely sure.”

There was an unhealthy relish to his voice.

“Just do what you have to do.”

The reave inclined his head. he said.

“Naturally. You need my eyes.”

<1 will also need you to tell me when I have found the information you seek.>

“I can assist you in other ways, if you like.”

He paused.

The thought of Roche being tortured didn’t bother her at all. Not that she could have hidden it from the reave even if it did. “That’s not something you have to worry about,” she said.

His smile was an open wound between his cheeks.

“By epsense, immediately,” she said. “You will have full access to her body once the autosurgeon has finished. In theory, you will have as much time as you need. In practice, however, I think you should proceed as quickly as you can. There’s always a possibility that we’ll be traced.” She was still nervous about the Box. However it had survived, and whatever it was doing on the
Phlegethon,
the fact that it was out there at all made her anxious. The one thing she couldn’t take into account in her plans was a rogue, hyperintelligent machine.

said the reave.

“Be that as it may, I’d still like you to hurry.”

Lemmas moved closer to the table and rolled up the sleeves of his robe. His hands were as slender as the rest of his body; his right hand possessed six fingers. He had no fingernails, and below each knuckle were tattoos like rings. He stood for a moment with his head bowed over the operating table, uncannily as though gazing at Roche’s face.

The autosurgeon whirred as it unwound artificial nerves from Roche’s arm.

De Bruyn wondered when and how Lemmas would start.

he said.

He reached out with one hand to stroke Morgan Roche’s face and, even though she was unconscious, she flinched from his touch.

* * *

It was less crude than De Bruyn had anticipated. Barely minutes after the autosurgeon had finished—leaving Roche with several wounds across her body, one hand crippled and an empty eye socket—Lemmas began in earnest. All he did was touch her. De Bruyn couldn’t tell whether his mind had powerful psychosomatic effects, or if his nail-less fingertips held hidden tools, but his slightest touch pierced skin, parted fat, and slit through muscle with disturbing ease.

Roche remained unconscious throughout the procedure. De Bruyn didn’t ask if that was Lemmas’s decision. The autosurgeon might have been keeping her sedated while she recovered from its ministrations. A couple of times De Bruyn had to override its attempts to intervene in Lemmas’s work, but she resisted turning it off completely; she didn’t want Roche dying from shock before she had learned everything there was to learn.

Lemmas held one hand over Roche’s mouth as though he were trying to keep her silent. A tiny line of blood trickled down her cheek and onto the table.

“Where does she come from?”

“That’s not the point. I want to know what
she
thinks.”

he said, with the faintest hint of irritation.

“When was she born?”

De Bruyn nodded. That accorded with COE Intelligence and Armada records, but still had not been verified independently.

“Who were her parents?”

“There are no deep memories at all?”

He paused for barely a couple of seconds; Roche’s body stiffened. he said.

“So she does remember her childhood?”

he said, as if at that very moment his mind was caressing those particular memories from Roche’s past.

“Give me an example.”

he said.

“Not dreams,” snapped De Bruyn. “Are there any
real
memories?”

Lemmas didn’t hesitate:

“Enough of that,” she said. “Tell me what she was afraid of.”

he said.

“Was that why she put her name down for the Armada intake?” De Bruyn asked.

said Lemmas.

“Did she ever find them?” De Bruyn was suddenly very interested in this line of questioning.

De Bruyn nodded thoughtfully to herself. “Was she ever sick before joining the Armada?”

There was another slight pause. he said.

“She was treated on Ascensio?”

De Bruyn noted that treatment of neither condition appeared in Roche’s official records. “Go back to the orphanage,” she said. “Does she remember any of the caregivers’ names from there?”

Lemmas rattled off five names, two of which De Bruyn recognized from her research.

“And did she have friends in the orphanage, or outside?”

More names followed. De Bruyn consigned them to her implants; she would check them later.

“What about emotional or physical intimacy?”

De Bruyn couldn’t help a slight sneer. “Was she ever in love?”

Lemmas didn’t reply immediately.

“That doesn’t mean there weren’t any,” said De Bruyn. “I want someone who will remember her—somebody who couldn’t possibly forget her. Caregivers can forget, and even friends might with time—but a lover never forgets.”

Lemmas recounted several instances that, on the surface at least, suggested a willingness to open up to friends and colleagues—a willingness that De Bruyn knew Roche had not shown in Military College nor any time after graduating. She had always been considered aloof by those who came to know her—emotionally distant and efficient, very much like the machines she had once regarded as friends. Yet what Lemmas recounted now of Roche’s past portrayed a woman who at least had dabbled with the idea of sharing life with someone else, but who had ultimately rejected it—maybe because it made her feel vulnerable; maybe because her sexual needs simply weren’t that great; maybe because she was self-sufficient within herself. For whatever reason, there were only a handful of people, male and female, who featured in Roche’s memories as ones who might have been regarded as “lovers.”

De Bruyn had hoped for more, but she was content with anything at all. She at least had more knowledge, now, of Roche’s life on Ascensio, and that knowledge could be verified in time. All she needed was one person to say that they recalled Roche, and De Bruyn would have the proof that the official information had been covered up.

She was still missing the
why,
though.
That
would be much harder to find, she was sure.

At her instigation, Lemmas dug deeper. A life as unremarkable as that of any other orphan from an out-of-the-way world presented itself: her hopes, her fears; her delights, her disappointments; her ambitions, her failures; her dreams, and her everyday anxieties. The COE was full of people like her.

So why, then, De Bruyn wondered, had she been chosen? And, more importantly, for
what
?

After four hours, they took a break. De Bruyn was tired and, although he displayed nothing but cool aloofness, she suspected that Lemmas was also feeling the strain. Roche’s condition was a concern, too. De Bruyn couldn’t tell exactly what the autosurgeon’s data meant, but the patient
was
showing signs of extreme stress. That was the idea, of course, but it was possible to push too far too soon.

Lemmas asked.

“No.” She didn’t feel inclined to discuss her quest with the reave; the fact that he could reach into her mind and pluck out the information himself only made his asking all the more insincere. “How deep can you dig?”

he said with unfaltering confidence.

“Is it possible to hide information from you?”

he admitted.

“How?”

“Which aspect of the mission?”

“What about the AI?”

<1 don’t know. That’s what the block is for.>

She ignored his sarcasm. “Can you break through it?”

“Could it be that she doesn’t want anyone to know that the Box still exists?”

She studied Roche’s face in silence for a moment. Bruised, missing one eye, encrusted with blood, the woman was barely recognizable. Fleetingly De Bruyn wondered if she might be wrong—if Roche wasn’t as important as she had first thought. What would she do if all this had been for nothing?

But there was no getting past the enemy’s fixation on her: the way they had disseminated her name and interfered with her work among the Vax, the Fathehi, and the Noske. And what of Adoni Cane? It all had to fit together somehow. If she wasn’t herself a clone warrior, then there had to be another explanation.

De Bruyn glanced again at Roche’s genetic code. The unidentifiable sections remained just as mysterious as they had been before, different from those of the clone warriors
and
any known Caste. Random mutations? She didn’t know. But at least now she had that data.

The voice came from the command network, not the reave. said the pilot.

She felt a tiny shot of adrenaline.

she said.

Apostle,
but we haven’t been signaled yet.>

A slight apprehension tightened her gut. The idea of the Disciples’ leader arriving made her uneasy. she said.

The pilot went back to his work with no mention of Roche. That side of their mission was not relevant to him.

But cracking Roche
was
relevant to De Bruyn, and she was conscious now of time running out.

“Let’s continue,” she said, approaching the table.

The reave inclined his head. Earlier, he had removed the pack covering the great wound through Roche’s chest. Smoke came from where his index finger now brushed the stump of her shattered clavicle.

She only had to think for a second; there were so many questions to choose from. “Find out if she knew anything about the enemy prior to her meeting with Adoni Cane.”

He probed Roche’s mind at the same time as he sent her nerves jangling with pain.

“Then did she know anything unusual about the Box prior to commencing her mission on the
Midnight
?”

“Has she ever had any contact with Eupatrid Gastel or his predecessor?”

“Does she know why I was sacked?”

been
sacked.>

De Bruyn sighed. She hadn’t really believed it would be so easy—but it would have been nice.

She tried another tack: Did Roche know how the clone warriors communicated among themselves? Did she know why Cane was helping her? Did she know who made him? Did she know why she seemed to be the only one who could find them?

The answers came as rapidly as De Bruyn fired the questions, and each time the response was the same:
No.

Her questioning became bolder, and Lemmas’s probing blunter: Was Roche aware of any plan to the engagements in Sol System? Was the fact that they were in Sol System in the first place significant, or was that just chance? To her knowledge, was the planetary ring as dire a navigation hazard as the Heresiarch feared—and if so, why?

But again, Roche had no knowledge of these things.

De Bruyn moved down to details. Had Proctor Klose, captain of the
Midnight,
known anything about Cane? What about Uri Kajic, ex-captain of the
Ana Vereine
? Why did she think Cane’s introns were so important? Did she know where Jelena Heidik was hiding, or how many of the enemy were still at large in the system? Did she know anything
at all
about the movements of the enemy?

Within fifteen minutes De Bruyn guessed that Roche in fact didn’t know anything about the big picture; two hours more and she was convinced of it. Nevertheless, she persisted, digging for what she suspected might remain behind a veil she hadn’t pulled back yet, working through her own fatigue and the continuing fluctuation of Roche’s condition. If the reave’s finer efforts weren’t successful, maybe sheer persistence would win the day.

The trouble was, she was running out of questions. Since the only area she had taken steps to avoid was that of the Box, it was there that De Bruyn finally turned. She didn’t know why it was important, but Roche clearly thought so, and that was enough for her.