When I'd finished my account of the killers' media presentation, Kuwale said flatly, "Don't kid yourself that you ever had a chance. No one could have talked them out of it."
"No?" I didn't believe ver. They'd talked themselves into it, systematically enough. There had to be a way to unravel their own supposedly watertight logic before their eyes—to force them to confront its absurdity.
I hadn't been able to find it, though. I hadn't been able to get inside their heads.
I checked the time with Witness; it was almost dawn. I couldn't stop shivering; the slick of algae on the floor felt damper than ever, and the hard polymer beneath had grown cold as steel.
"Mosala will be under close protection." Kuwale had been despondent when I left ver, but in my absence ve seemed to have recovered a streak of defiant optimism. "I sent a copy of your mutant cholera genome to conference security, so they know the kind of risk she's facing—even it she won't acknowledge it herself. And there are plenty of other mainstream AC back on Stateless."
"No one back on Stateless knows that Wu is involved, do they? And anyway… Wu could have infected Mosala with a bioweapon days ago. Do you think they would have confessed everything, on camera, if the assassination wasn't already a fait accompli?. They wanted to ensure that they'd receive due credit, they had to get in early and avoid the rush, before everyone from PACDF to EnGeneUity comes under suspicion. But it would have to be the last thing they'd do, before confirming that she's dead, and fleeing Stateless." Meaning that nothing I'd said above deck could have made the slightest difference? Not quite. They might still have furnished an antidote, their own pre-existing magic bullet.
Kuwale fell silent. I listened for distant voices or footsteps, but there was nothing: the creaking of the hull, the white noise of a thousand waves.
So much for my grandiose visions of rebirth through adversity as a fearless champion of technoliberation. All I'd done was stumble into a vicious game between rival lunatic god-makers—and been cut back down to my proper station in life: conveyor of someone else's messages.
Kuwale said, "Do you think they're monitoring us, right now? Up on deck?"
"Who knows?" I looked around the dark hold; I wasn't even sure if the faint gray light which might have been the far wall was real, or just retinal static and imagination. I laughed. "What do they think we're going to do? Jump six meters into the air, punch a hole in the hatch, and then swim a hundred kilometers—all dressed as Siamese twins?"
I felt a sudden sharp tug on the rope around my hands. Irritated, I almost protested aloud—but I stopped myself in time. It seemed Kuwale had made good use of an hour without vis wrists jammed between our backs. Working some slack into vis own bonds and then hiding the loop between vis hands… which in turn might have helped ver keep them slightly apart, when we were tied together again? Whatever houdini ve'd used, after a few more minutes of painstaking manipulation the tension on the rope vanished. Kuwale pulled vis arms free of the space between us, and stretched them wide.
I couldn't help feeling a rush of pure, dumb elation—but I waited for the inevitable sound of boots on the deck. IR cameras in the hold, monitored non-stop by software, would have registered this transgression easily.
The silence stretched on. Grabbing us must have been a spur-of-the-moment decision when they intercepted my call to Kuwale—if they'd planned it in advance, they would have had handcuffs, at the very least. Maybe their surveillance technology, at short notice, was as down-market as their ropes and nets.
Kuwale shuddered with relief—I envied ver; my own shoulders were painfully cramped—then squeezed vis hands back into the gap.
The polymer rope was slippery, and knotted tight—and Kuwale's fingernails were cut short (they ended up in my flesh several times). When my hands were finally untied, it was an anticlimax; the surge of elation had long faded, I knew we didn't have the slightest chance of escape. But anything was better than sitting in the dark and waiting for the honor of announcing Mosala's death to the world.
The net was made from a smart plastic which adhered selectively to its own opposite surface—presumably for ease of repair—and the join was as strong as the stuff itself. We'd been wrapped tight with our arms behind us, though; now that they were free, there was some slack—four or five centimeters. We rose to our feet awkwardly, shoes slipping on the algal slime. I exhaled, and flattened my stomach, glad of my recent fast.
The first dozen attempts failed. In the dark, it took ten or fifteen minutes of tortuous repositioning to find a way of standing which minimized our combined girth all the way down. It seemed like the kind of arduous, inane activity contestants would have to go through on game shows in Hell. By the time the net touched the floor, I'd lost all feeling in my calves;
I took a few steps across the hold and almost keeled over. I could hear the faint click of fingernails slipping over plastic; Kuwale was already working on the rope around vis feet. No one had bothered to bind my legs, the second time; I paced a few meters in the darkness, working out the kinks, making the most of the visceral illusion of freedom while it lasted.
I walked back to where Kuwale was sitting, and bent down until I could make out the whites of vis eyes; ve reached up and pressed a vertical finger to my lips. I nodded assent. So far, it seemed we'd been lucky— no IR camera—but there might still be audio surveillance, and there was no way of knowing how smart the listening software might be.
Kuwale stood up, turned and vanished; vis T-shirt had gone dead, deprived of sunlight for so long. I heard occasional squeaks from the wet soles of vis shoes; ve seemed to be slowly circumnavigating the hold. I had no idea what ve was hoping to find—some unlikely breach in the structure itself? I stood and waited. The faint line of light on the floor was visible again, just barely. Dawn was breaking, and daylight could only mean more people awake on deck.
I heard Kuwale approach; ve tapped my arm, then took my elbow. I followed ver to a corner of the hold. Ve pressed my hand to the wall, about a meter up. Ve'd found some kind of utilities panel, guarded by a protective cover, a small spring-loaded door flush with the wall. I hadn't noticed it when we were being lowered in, but the walls were heavily stained and spattered, an effective camouflage pattern.
I explored the exposed panel with my fingertips. There was a low voltage DC power socket. Two threaded metal fittings, each a couple of centimeters wide, with flow-control levers beneath them. Whatever they supplied—or whatever they were meant to pump out—they didn't strike me as much of an asset. Unless Kuwale had visions of flooding the hold, so we could float up to the hatch?
I almost missed it. At the far right of the panel, there was a shallow-rimmed circular aperture, just five or six millimeters wide. An optical interface port.
Connected to what? The boat's main computer? If the vessel's original design had allowed for carrying cargo, maybe a crew member with a portable terminal would have fed in inventory data from here. In a fishing boat leased to Anthrocosmologists, I didn't have high hopes that it was configured to do anything at all.
I unbuttoned my shirt, while invoking Witness. The software had a crude "virtual terminal" option which would let me view any incoming data, and mime-type as if on a keyboard. I unsealed the interface port in my navel, and stood pressed against the wall, trying to align the two connectors. It was awkward—but after wriggling out of the fishing net, this seemed like no challenge at all.
The best I could get was a brief surge of random text—and then an error message from the software itself. It was picking up an answering signal but the data was scrambled beyond recognition. Both ports were sockets, designed to be joined to an umbilical's connector. Their identical protective rims kept them too far apart—their photodetectors a millimeter beyond the plane of focus of each others signal lasers.
I stepped back, trying not to vent my frustration audibly. Kuwale touched my arm, inquiringly. I put vis hand to my face, shook my head, then guided vis finger to my artificial navel. Ve clapped me on the shoulder: I understand. Okay. We tried.
I stood slumped against the wall beside the panel. It occurred to me that if I buried the ACs' confession, EnGeneUity might still get the blame. If Helen Wu and friends, in hiding, tried claiming responsibility after the fact, they were more than likely to be written off as obscure cranks. No one had ever heard of Anthrocosmologists. Mosala's martyrdom could, still, break the boycott wide open.
I could already hear myself reciting the comforting rationalization over and over in my head: It would have been what she wanted.
I took off my belt and forced the prong of the buckle into the flesh around my metal navel. There was a thin layer of bioengineered connective tissue around the surgical steel, sealing the permanent wound against infection; the sound of tearing collagen set my teeth on edge, but there were no nerve endings to register the damage. A couple of centimeters down, though, I hit the metal flange which anchored the port in place. I levered the flesh away from the tube, and managed to force the prong past the edge of the flange.
It had seemed like a small enough piece of DIY surgery: enlarging the existing hole in the abdominal wall by seven or eight millimeters. My body disagreed. I persisted, digging around under the flange and trying to twist it free, while conflicting waves of chemical messengers flooded out from the site, delivering razor-sharp rebukes and analgesic comfort in turn. Kuwale came over and helped me, pulling the aperture open. As vis warm fingers brushed the scars where I'd slashed myself in front of Gina, I found I had an erection; it was the wrong response for so many reasons that I almost burst out laughing. Sweat ran into my eyes, blood trickled down toward my groin—and my body kept on blindly signaling desire. And the truth was, if ve'd been willing, I would have happily lain down on the floor and made love in any way possible. Just to feel more of vis skin against my skin. Just to believe that we'd made some kind of connection.
The buried steel tube emerged, trailing a short length of blood-slick optical fiber. I turned away and spat out a mouthful of acid. Mercifully, nothing followed.
I waited for my fingers to stop shaking, then wiped everything clean on my shirt, and unscrewed the whole end assembly, leaving the windowed port naked, unencumbered. More like circumcision than phalloplasty—and a lot of trouble to go through for a millimeter of penetration. I pocketed the metal foreskin, then found the wall socket and tried again.
Large, cheerful, blue-on-white letters appeared in front of me— unable to dazzle, but no less of a shock.
Mitsubishi Shanghai Marine
Model Number LMHDV-12-5600
Emergency Options:
F—launch Flares
B—activate radio Beacon
I hit all the possible escape codes, in the hope of finding some wider menu—but this was it, the complete list of choices. All the glorious fantasies I hadn't dared entertain had involved reaching the ship's main computer, gaining instant access to the net, and archiving the ACs' pre-recorded confession in twenty safe places, while simultaneously sending copies to everyone at the Einstein Conference. This was nothing but a vestigial emergency system—probably built into the design as a minimum statutory requirement, and then ignored when the ship was fitted out by a third party with proper communications and navigation equipment. Ignored—or disconnected? I mimed typing B.
The text of a simple mayday broadcast flowed across the virtual screen. It gave the ship's model number, serial number, latitude and longitude—if I remembered the map of Stateless correctly, we were closer to the island than I'd thought—and stated that "survivors" were located in the "main cargo hold." I suddenly had a strong suspicion that if we'd bothered to search the rest of the hold, we might have found another panel, hiding two fist-sized red buttons labeled BEACON and FLARES—but I didn't want to think about that.
Somewhere up on deck, a siren started screaming. Kuwale was dismayed. "What did you do? Trigger a fire alarm?"
"I broadcast a mayday. I thought flares might get us into trouble." I closed the panel and started rebuttoning my bloody shirt, as if hiding the evidence might help.
I heard someone heavy running across the deck. A few seconds later, the siren shut off. Then the hatch was wound halfway open, and Three peered down at us. He was holding a gun, almost absent mindedly. "What good do you think that's going to do you? We're sending out the false-alarm code already; no one's going to take any notice." He seemed more bemused than angry. "All you have to do is sit tight and stop fucking about, and you'll be free soon enough. So how about some cooperation?"
He unfurled the ladder and came down, alone. I stared up at the strip of pale dawn sky behind him; I could see a fading satellite, but I had no way to reach it. Three picked up two pieces of discarded rope and tossed them at us. "Sit down and tie your feet together. Do it properly and you might get breakfast." He yawned widely, then turned and yelled, "Giorgio! Anna! Give me a hand!"
Kuwale rushed him, faster than I'd seen anyone move in my life. Three raised the gun and shot ver in the thigh. Kuwale staggered, pirouetting, still moving forward. Three kept the gun aimed squarely on ver, as vis knees buckled and vis head sagged. As the shot's reverb faded from my skull, I could hear ver gasping for breath.
I stood and shouted abuse at him, barely conscious of what I was saying. I'd lost it: I wanted to take the hold, the ship, the ocean, and wipe them all away like cobwebs. I stepped forward, waving my arms wildly, screaming obscenities. Three glanced at me, perplexed, as if he couldn't imagine what all the fuss was about. I took another step, and he aimed the gun at me.
Kuwale sprang forward and knocked him off his feet. Before he could rise, ve leapt on him and pinned his arms, slamming his right hand against the floor. I was paralyzed for a second, convinced that the struggle was futile, but then I ran to help.
Three must have looked like an indulgent father playing with two belligerent five-year-olds. I tugged at the gun barrel protruding from his huge fist; the weapon might as well have been set in stone. He seemed ready to climb to his feet as soon as he caught his breath, with or without Kuwale's slender frame attached.