"Mmph! Mmmph."
Defiant to the endthat's me. I look up at Janis. "Why didn't you kill her?"
"I didn't want to," says Janis.
"What, you're going to just"
"Just put her in the gate!" She sounds stressed.
I get my hands under Reeve's armpits and lift. She goes limp, trying to deadweight on me. "I don't like this any more than you do," I tell her. "But this town's too small for both of us."
As I dump her into the A-gate, she kicks out with both legs, but I'm expecting that, and I punch her over the left kidney. That makes her double up. I swing the door shut. "Well?" I glare at Janis. "What now?" I feel like shit. Killing myself always makes me feel like shit. That's why I'm deferring to Janis, I think. Pushing the tough choice off onto someone else's shoulders.
Janis is bending over the control station. "Figuring this out," she murmurs. "Look, I'm going to lift a template from her, okay?
"Fuck." I shake my head, a parody of resignation. There's a thud from inside the A-gate, and I wince. I feel for Reeve: I can see myself in her place, and it's horrifying. "Why?"
"Because." Janis looks up at me. "Fiore's going to suspect if we keep you running around in drag. Don't you think it's time for you to go back?"
"Back?"
"To being Reeve," she says patiently.
"Oh," I echo. "Oh , I see." Being thumped on the head has left me sluggish and stupid. Janis is right, we don't have to kill her. And suddenly I feel a whole lot better about punching Reeve and dumping her into a macro-scale nanostructure disassembler, for the same reason that punching yourself in the face never feels quite as bad as having someone else do it for you.
"I'm going to template from her, and then you're going to follow her, and I'm going to take a delta from your current neural state vector and overlay it on Reeve. You'll wake up back in her body, with both sets of memories, but you're going to be the dominant set. Think that'll work?"
There's another muffled thump from inside the A-gate, then muffled retching noisesJanis has triggered the template program, paralyzing Reeve via her netlink, and the chamber is filling with ablative digitizer foam. "It had better," I say.
"I'm worried Fiore may suspect what's going on. The thing with Mick could blow it completely if he puts two and two together."
I sigh heavily. "Okay, I'll go back to being Reeve. I suppose that makes sense."
"You agree?" She looks haggard in the dim light from the ceiling bulbs. "Good, then it's not entirely stupid. What then... ?"
"Then we sit down and figure out how to nail down the lid on this mess. Once I know what she knows."
"Right." Her lips quirk in a faint smile. "Your direct, no-nonsense approach is always like a breath of fresh air."
"Once a tank, always a tank," I remind her.
"Right," she echoes, and for a moment I can see a shadow of her former self. That sends a pang through my chest.
"The sooner I'm myself again, the better."
We sit in silence for long minutes while the gate chugs to itself, then finally the console chimes, and there's a click as the door unlatches. I walk over and swing it open: as usual, the chamber is bare and dry. I glance over and see that she's watching me.
"Ready?" she asks.
"See you on the other side, Sanni," I say as I close the door.
That's all.
SECURITY Cell Blue used to be part of the counterespionage division of the Linebarger Cats. It was supposedly disbanded, all memory traces erased, at the end of the censorship wars. I know this is not the case because I'm a member. We didn't disband, we went undergroundbecause our mission wasn't over.
This is a risky business. Our job is to do unpleasant things to ruthless people. Covering our tracks costs moneylots of it, and it isn't always fungible across polity frontiers these days. Local militias and governments have reinvented exchange rates, currency hedges, and a whole host of other archaic practices. Some polities are relatively open, while others have fallen into warlordism. Some place great stock on authentication and uniqueness tracking, while others don't care who you think you are as long as you pay your oxygen tax. (The former make great homes; the latter make great refuges.) As a consequence of the postwar fragmentation, we end up moving around a lot, shuffling our appearances and sometimes our memories, forking spares and merging deltas. At first we live off the capital freed up by the Cats' liquidation; later we supplement it by setting up a variety of business fronts. (If you've ever heard of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, or Cordwainer Heavy Industries, that's us.) Operationally, we work in loosely coupled cells. I'm one of the heavy hitters, my background in combat ops meshing neatly with my intelligence experience.
About fifty megs after the official end of hostilities, I receive a summons to the Polity of the Jade Sunrise. It's a strictly tech-limiting polity, and I'm in ortho drag, my cover being a walkabout sword-fighting instructor. I've got access to enough gray-market military wetware that I can walk the walk as well as slice the floating hair, and my second-level cover is as a demilitarized fugitive from summary justice somewhere that isn't tech-limitedwhich sets me up for the Odessa Introduction if I see a target of opportunity and need to run a Spanish Prisoner scam on them. I've been doing a lot of that kind of job lately, but I'm not sure what this particular one is about.
The designated rendezvous is the public bathhouse on the Street of Orange Leaves. It's a narrow, cobbled, mountainside road, running from near the main drag with the silversmith's district down toward the harbor. It's a fine spring afternoon, and the air is heavy with the smell of honeysuckle. A gang of kids are playing throw-stick loudly outside the drunkenly leaning apartment buildings, and the usual light foot traffic is laboriously winding its way up and down the middle of the road, porters yelling insults at rickshaw drivers and both groups venting their spleen on the shepherd who's trying to drive a small flock of spidergoats uphill.
I've been here long enough to know what I'm doing, more or less. I spot a boy who's hanging back on the sidelines and snap my fingers. He comes over, not so much walking as slithering so that his friends don't see him. Grubby, half-starved, his clothes faded and patched: perfect. A coin appears between two of my fingers. "Want another?" I ask.
He nods. "I don't do thex," he lisps. I look closer and realize he's got a cleft palate.
"Not asking you to." I make another coin appear, this time out of reach. "The teahouse. I want you to look round the back alley and see if there are any men waiting there. If there are, come and tell me. If not, go in and find Mistress Sanni. Tell her that the Tank says hello, then come and tell me."
"Two coin." He holds up a couple of fingers.
"Okay, two coin." I glare at him, and he does the disappearing trick again. The kid's got talent, I realize, he does that like a pro. Sharp doubts intrude: Maybe he is a pro? We rounded up the easy targets a long time agothe ones who're still running ahead of us tend to be a lot harder to nail.
I don't have long to wait. A cent or so passes, then lisp-boy is back. "Mithreth Thanni thay, the honeypot ith overflowing. I take you to her."
The honeypot is overflowing: doesn't sound good. I pass him the two coins. "Okay, which way?"
He does a quick fade in front of me, but not too fast for me to follow. We're round the back of a dubious alleyway, then into a maze of anonymous backyards in a matter of seconds. Then he goes over a rickety wooden fence and along another alleythis one full of compost, the stink unbelievableand up to an anonymous-looking back door. "The'th here."