‘Let us start,’ She says, ‘With who I was . . .Leona Zabo, third in command of App 85. An exploratory mission with terraforming abilities. Five officers, fifteen NCOs, one civilian physicist, two biologists, a pet geek, and sixty passengers.’
Leona shrugs.
‘They were frozen, obviously.’
Obviously?
‘Thirty pairs,’ she says, adding, ‘the passengers,’ when I look blank. ‘That was our minimum for long-term DNA mixing. Sixty disparate sets. All of us had been screened for hereditary diseases, genetic weaknesses, the usual.’
Leona turns back to the window. She’s looking for something. When she finds Calinda Gap, she stops. So I guess she’s found it.
‘That’s where our lander crashed,’ she says. ‘Caught in the bow wave. Its core went critical. All that fallout fucked the carefully chosen DNA . . .’
‘Caught in the what?’
‘Bow wave,’ she says. ‘The singularity bow wave. A hundred and fifty years out. We’d been left behind and then the future overtook us.’ Her mouth twists and she bites her lip without realizing it. ‘Pods fell out of the sky, oxygen scrubbers failed, half the food coming out of the Drexie was poisoned.’
She wipes her eyes.
‘I assumed command when Colonel Farlight died. Major B didn’t disagree. Of course, she was dying by then. I named our base after the colonel, and our landing fields after Major B . . . Betty Emsworth,’ she adds, in case I’m not following.
‘And then,’ she says, ‘I went to sleep. When I woke . . .’
Leona nods at the city beyond the glass.
‘Most of that was already there. We had oxygen, water, grass and trees. A main street, a square, a cathedral. All it needed was people. And that wasn’t a problem because Calinda downloaded minds into meat as fast as she could.’
A bit of me is worried I’m not following what Leona is saying.
A bigger bit is fucking terrified that I’m following every word. She’s one of the originals. That makes her high clan. High clans live longer. What I don’t get is why she’d pretend to be a militia sergeant.
What was she doing delivering messages from Vijay Jaxx?
And what the fuck does she think she’s doing out on a night like this? Anyone with her money should have holed themselves up behind high walls or abandoned the city when the riots went out of control. For most, leaving Farlight means using roads. But the clans have planes and copters. Some are said to have gates. You enter one side, you exit somewhere else.
‘Sven.’ She takes my face in her hands. ‘You still don’t get it.’
‘What?’ I say crossly. ‘What the fuck don’t I get?’
‘Take a good look at me.’
‘I did, remember? You’re Serenity.’
Leona smiles. ‘That’s one of my names,’ she agrees. ‘Major Zabo is another. A few people, like you, know me as Leona. As for the rest.’
She hesitates.
‘It gets complicated. I died, you see. So Calinda held me while my new body grew. Only I liked being inside Calinda, and she liked having an interface. This was before Hekati made the AIs unite. And that was long before Gareisis . . .’
Oh fuck. ‘You’re . . .’
‘No one betrays OctoV while I’m around. Don’t care if it’s pretend. Don’t care if it’s a trick. We’re not signing. Wasn’t that what you told Colonel Vijay on Hekati?’
She’s got it word for word.
‘So you’ll keep this quiet, right?’ Leona says.
That’s not really a question. Turns out, she’s M’OctoV. Mission eighty-five. Made flesh in the person of Captain Leona Zabo . . .
‘But OctoV’s a boy.’
She sighs. ‘This body’s older,’ she says. ‘Usually I’m younger. Think about it. Curly blond hair, soft hips, puppy fat. Everyone says I look androgynous.’ She stops to explain what that means. ‘It began years ago. The questing prince. Strong but defenceless. Young but timeless. We never bothered to . . .’
Her words dry up.
Colonel Vijay looks less pale than he did. His floppy hair is pushed from his eyes. He’s obviously washed out his mouth, because droplets stain his flak jacket. Although now isn’t the time to mention it.
‘Sven,’ he says. ‘If I might have a word.’
As Colonel Vijay nods towards the door, Leona shoots me a look that tells me to keep her secret to myself. OpSec, apparently. So I grin and she scowls, which only makes me grin harder.
The body of Paper Osamu’s husband lies where we left it, blood glazing the tiles and staining the grouting between them. A greenness tinges his face. Meat rots fast in this heat, unless he was rotten already. Who knows how long he kept that body?
‘This savagery is planned,’ Colonel Vijay says. ‘The light tanks on the bridges, the zep with its furies, half the militia out of the city, the rest corrupted. It suggests an intentional strategy.’
Thought that was obvious.
Furies don’t appear by accident. They’re illegal, even here. You have to source them, make shipping arrangements, grease palms and fix paperwork.
‘The Thomassi,’ he tells me, ‘are behind this.’
I don’t doubt they’re involved.
For all I know, they planted stooges in the crowd to say which houses to burn and which shops to loot and which to save. But this is bigger than a bitch fight between the Jaxx and the Thomassi over who gives the best supper parties, or whatever these people really quarrel about.
And even if you throw in Farlight’s archbishop, the mistrust believers have of doubters and the city’s previous history of rioting, it’s still bigger than that. He must realize it. There’s a crowd in the street below calling for OctoV’s death.
OctoV’s death.
They want peace with the Uplifted. Trading rights between planets, votes for all, not just male members of the high clans. The death penalty must be abolished for all but the most major crimes.
‘Sir,’ I say. ‘It’s-’
Colonel Vijay’s not listening.
‘The Thomassi insist we killed their senator.’ He sounds outraged at the slur. No, he sounds young and scared and furious. ‘Everyone knows that’s a lie.’
‘You did kill their senator.’
The colonel gapes at me.
‘Sir,’ I say, ‘I killed him. That was how I met Aptitude. On her wedding day, as her wedding feast was about to begin. I should have shot her as well. Before the ceremony began-’
‘But why?’
‘Because those were your father’s orders.’
Vijay shuts his eyes.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘I don’t do whys. I do whats. So I don’t know why the general had Senator Thomassi killed. Why he chose then to do it. Or why I was chosen to carry it out. But he did and I did and the senator died. Your father declared war on the Thomassi and they fought back. Your father knew something would happen.’
‘Not this,’ Colonel Vijay says.
I wouldn’t put anything past the old bastard. His conscience wasn’t deleted, so much as overwritten to military standards, and the technicians who oversaw it taken out and shot. All the same, I agree.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I doubt he expected this.’
There is a lot that doesn’t make sense. This control room for a start. Just who are the U/Free controlling? The Thomassi? The archbishop? General Luc’s Wolf Brigade? The city militia? The crowd of believers looting shops below?
All of them? Or none?
Now is the time to tell Colonel Vijay about Leona. Something stops me. Partly, that he’s close to cracking and I’m not sure how much more he can handle. But also I can see an advantage in not telling him. Hell, there can’t be that many people in history who’ve had the emperor on tap.
‘Sven,’ he says, ‘where are your friends?’
He means the Aux. ‘Anton’s gone to fetch them, sir.’
‘Are we expecting them any time soon?’ His drawl is returning, the smile on his lips is supposed to suggest it’s all so amusing. That’s how I know he thinks this is the end. If not here, then near here. If not now, then soon.
He’s putting on his armour.
Colonel Vijay Jaxx, teenage son of General Indigo Jaxx and new Duke of Farlight, although I don’t think he realizes that yet, is getting ready to die. Being Death’s Head, he intends to do it well.
Me, I intend to live, until that stops being an option.
Then I’m going to join him.