‘We have a very specific task to accomplish. During the Soft War, many Totality components were captured by your forces and brought home as souvenirs. They retain trace elements of mind consciousness. We are incomplete without them. Under the peace treaty with your Pantheon, we are empowered to search Station to find and recover them.’
‘Are you having much luck?’
‘You have seen how we are received here.’
‘Tough job.’
‘It is satisfying when we find a fragment of mind. Of course, there is much that is still missing. Several complete minds remain unaccounted for. We are liaising with InSec to resolve this matter. It claims to have no knowledge of them, and our searches have turned up very little of substance. But we have a duty to our lost. So we keep looking.’
‘All over Station?’
‘Here and in Homelands. We have a team negotiating the terms of the peace between our peoples in Heaven, but we have not been allowed to search up there.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Yes. But what can we do?’ Ifor shrugged, a remarkably organic gesture of resignation. ‘Anyway’ he continued, ‘I have been asked to make you an offer.’
[ Here it comes, Jack. They’re going to want you to do their dirty work for them.]
‘While we’ve been talking I’ve been in communication with my seniors. We are aware that the life of a parolee is not easy. We are here to perform a very specific set of tasks and as such we are empowered to deputise selected Station inhabitants to assist us. Were you to accept such a role, we would be able to extend our diplomatically protected status to you. We would of course also release funds to cover any expenses you incur before the end. This would, I suspect, make the time remaining to you considerably easier.’
‘You can make an offer like that?’
‘Yes. It is what you may call a loophole. The Pantheon’s negotiators never thought to specify who we could and couldn’t ask to represent us.’
‘And what would I need to do in return?’
‘A certain amount of searching to show InSec that your employment was genuine, but the work would not be onerous. You would, however, be performing a very genuine service for us. You can move through your world with an ease that we lack.’
‘Station isn’t my world any more, Ifor. They threw me out with the trash. And I’ve done my bit for your people. I respect what you are, but it’s because of Totality action that I can’t disengage from Fist. I appreciate the offer, but no. I’ve had enough of both sides.’
‘I respect your decision and I’m sorry that our actions have hurt you. Our offer will remain open to you. I have left my contact details in your weavespace. If you change your mind, or if there is any other help we can give you, I will be easy to reach.’
‘There is one favour you can do for me.’
‘Name it.’
‘You can help me find someone. A singer called Andrea Hui.’
Ifor froze for a moment as he sifted through the weave. Then he looked towards Jack, his head pulsing with unreadable light.
‘Curious,’ he said. ‘She’s performing at a small club in Prayer Heights tomorrow night.’
‘What’s curious about that?’ said Jack.
‘She’s been dead for the last five years.’
Chapter 9
Jack had planned to find his father, but thoughts of Andrea’s death overwhelmed him. It explained the mystery of her silence since he’d announced his return, but not of her presence during the two years before it. He assumed that she’d never expected to have to do more than write to him, and so had taken fright at the news of his homecoming. Stripped of the restrictions of distance and prison, she would have to reveal that she was in fact a fetch. Rather than that, she’d chosen to say nothing.
But Jack couldn’t understand how she’d been able to communicate with him in the first place. It should be impossible for fetches to act so independently. He wondered briefly if he’d been the victim of an impostor. But his correspondent was fluent in feelings and moments that he and Andrea had never shared with anyone else. It was impossible to believe that he’d been hearing from anyone but her. He thought about how deft, how precise her support for him had been, as he’d come to terms with the end of his life. Her new status helped explain that too. She had a very personal understanding of what it meant to pass on.
And that led to the puzzle of her death. Andrea had apparently fallen victim to a drug overdose a few hours after Harry had been shot. Ifor found a news report explaining that grief had overwhelmed her. At best, she’d miscalculated an anaesthetic shot. At worst, the overdose had been entirely deliberate. But the Andrea Jack knew had never touched anything harder than wine or whisky, and even them only in very strict moderation. He thought back to the traces of Pantheon involvement he’d found in the Panther Czar’s accounts, and wondered what new corruption Harry might have uncovered; who could have found the potential spread of such knowledge threatening.
The hotel room oppressed Jack with unanswered questions. He went out into the street and started walking. He was heading for his parents’ neighbourhood, although he wasn’t yet too sure if he wanted to see them.
[All this angst! It’ll be different when I’m in charge, Jackie boy.]
[Oh, fuck off.]
After half an hour or so, Jack found himself standing on the edge of a void site. A kind of death had come to it. It had once been an apartment block, but terrorism had left it a burnt-out shell. Windows were dark holes where flames had roared out. Soot-black smoke stains leapt up the walls above them. There was no roof. The ruin had been left untouched since the fire. A high metal fence stopped anyone from getting too close.
Fist’s words were still buzzing through Jack’s thoughts. He remembered the rage that had taken him when he’d first truly accepted that he was going to die. He’d tried to attack Fist, but it was impossible to really damage him; ranted at him for hours, but the puppet had just laughed. He’d bargained with him, but they both soon realised that there was nothing either of them could do to slow or stop the end. There had been despair, too. In his blackest moments, Jack had thought of killing himself. But that came to seem like such a waste.
A woman stopped a few metres away from them. She was looking up at the dead building. Jack noticed that, very discreetly, she was crying.
[ I wonder what’s set her off ?] said Fist.
She was the right age to have lost a child on the moon. Jack thought of his own mother, of her fetch’s belief that he was dead. He thought of Andrea.
[ It’s a private moment, Fist. Let’s go.]
They walked in silence for a while. They were very close to Jack’s parents’ house. A meeting with his father would no doubt be painful. He doubted that he’d be allowed to see his mother’s fetch.
[ There was some pretty heavy security software in that void site, Jack. Some of the Rose’s best.]
[A bit much even for you?]
[ I could chew it up and spit it out, if it wasn’t for this fucking cage.]
Fist’s frustration buzzed in Jack’s mind. He so clearly wanted a different present to live in, built on a different past; one in which he’d been grown on a different host, been able to prove himself in different battles. That set Jack wondering how different his own life would have been without Fist, what he could have become if he hadn’t been sent away to fight a war that would break most of his links with his home and all of his faith in its gods. He remembered all the senior executives he’d worked for, and mapped his life on to theirs.
He wouldn’t have fallen out with his parents – but Grey would have lifted him very rapidly into a very responsible, very time-consuming role. He doubted that he would have seen very much of them. He would have been on-Station when Harry and Andrea died; but by then, Grey would have introduced him to a suitably corporate spouse – someone who would never have tolerated any sort of mourning for a failed relationship with a musician from Docklands. There would have been no communication with her fetch. And then, Grey’s fall would have come – a shattering professional and emotional challenge.