My hand goes to my sword hilt. "Really?" I stare at the kid, then at the two dead thugs leaning against each other beside the back step. The kid flashes a lightning grin at me.
"You did thay to check the back alley for muggerth, Robin."
"Sanni?"
He sketches a bow, urchin-cool. I raise an eyebrow. The muggers look as if they're sleeping, if you ignore the blood leaking from their noses. Very good work, for an intel type who isn't a wet ops specialist. "We don't have long. Authenticate me."
We do the routine, something shared, something do, something secret, something youall the stuff the Republic of Is used to do for us. "Okay, boss, why did you call me?" Sanni isn't my boss these days, but old habits die hard.
"The honeypot is leaking." He drops the lisp and stands tall, Sanni's natural presence shining through the bottleneck of his three-hundred-meg body. "WeVera Six, that isgot word about twenty megs ago that a bunch of familiar spooks were haunting the Invisible Republic. It all snowballed really fast. Looks like several of the memory laundries have been infiltrated and the glasshouse has been taken over."
I lean against the wall. "The glasshouse ?"
Sanni nods. "Someone's going to have to go in and polish the mirrors. Someone else. I forked an instance five megs ago, and she hasn't reported back yet. It's going to be deep cover, I'm afraid."
"Shit and pig-fucking shit." I glare at the dead muggers as if it's their fault.
The glasshouse is a rehab center for prisoners of war. The setup is designed to encourage resocialization, to help integrate them back into something vaguely resembling postwar society; it's a former MASucker configured as a compact polity with with just one T-gate in or out. Bad guys go in, civilians come out. At least, that was the original theory.
"What's going on?" I ask.
"I think someone's broken our operational security," says Sanni. I shudder and stare at the muggers. "Yes," he says, seeing the direction of my gaze. "I said we don't have long. A group drawn from several of our operational rivals have infiltrated the Strategic Amnesia Commissariat of the Invisible Republic and taken over the funding and operational control of the glasshouse. They discharged all the current inmates, and we no longer know what's going on inside. The glasshouse is under new management."
"I'm the wrong person, and in the wrong place. Can't you send Magnus? Or the Synthesist? Do an uplevel callback to descendant coordination and the veterans' association and see if anybody"
"I don't exist anymore," Sanni says calmly. "After my delta went in and didn't report back, the bad guys came after my primary and killed me repeatedly until I was almost entirely dead. This"he taps his skinny chest"is just a partial. I'm a ghost, Robin."
"But." I lick my lips, my heart pounding with shock. "Won't they simply kill me, too?"
"Not if you're identity-dead first." Sanni-ghost grins at me. "Here's what you're going to have to do..."
18. Connections
I am me. Joints creak, heart pumps. It's warm and dark, and I'm sleepy. It slowly comes to me that I'm squatting with my arms wrapped around my knees and my chinoh. So I'm not passing as Fiore? Right. That's satisfying to know. One more fact to add to the pile. Roll the dice, see what comes up on top.
I've been in two places at once for most of the past two weeks. I've been in hospital, recovering at home. Talking to Dr. Hanta, being horrified in the bell tower, trying to tell the Reverend about Janis. And another me has been living in the library, sleeping in the staff room, cautiously exploring off-limits sections of the habitat, and latterly conspiring with Janis. Sanni. A doubled moment of eternal jarring shockmeeting her head-on up the stairs with a gun in her hand, just as startled as a week ago, stumbling across her in the basement with a knife. She broke down and cried, then, when she realized she wasn't the only one anymore. I wouldn't have credited it if I hadn't been there myself. Hard-as-diamonds Sanni, reduced to this? Isolation does strange things to people...
"Come on, Reeve. Talk to me! Please. Are you all right in there?" There's a note of desperation in her voice. "Say something!" She leans over me anxiously. "How does it feel?"
"Let's see." I blink some more then unwrap my arms and push myself upright. I'm Reeve again. Damn, but I feel so light! After being tied down by the centripetal chains fastened to Fiore's flesh for more than a tenday, it's an amazing sensation. I could drift away on a light breeze. I find myself grinning with delight, then I look up at her and my face freezes. "Ishenearly shopped you to Fiore."
Janis blanches. "When?"
"After we disposed of Mick. Let me think." I close my eyes. I need to get rid of the sudden storm surge of adrenaline. "Low risk. Ishewas uncertain, and she misjudged her timing. She didn't know who you are, she just thought you were up to no good, so she tried to shop you for your own protection. Fiore was preoccupied and told her to get lost. As long as nothing reminds him, you're clear."
"Shit." Janis takes a step back, and I see that she's still holding the stunner, but she's got it pointed at the floor. She's swaying slightly, with relief or shock. "That was close."
I take a deep breath. "I've never been brainwashed before." A little part of me still thinks Dr. Hanta is a sympathetic and friendly practitioner who only means the best for me, but it's outvoted by the much larger part of me that is eager to use her intestines as a skipping rope. "I am"breathing too fast, slow down "not amused."
"Let's try a ping test." Janis hesitates for a moment. "Do you love me?"
"I love you." My heart speeds up again. "Hey, I heard that!"
"Yes." Janis nods. "I didn't, though. You know what? I think the diffmerge must have scribbled over part of the CY load in your netlink."
"No." I step out of the assembler and carefully close the door. "It happened earlier. I heard it earlier"I frown"talking to Sam, after I got out of hospital. I mean, she heard it."
"Curious." She cocks her head to one side, a very Sanni-like gesture that looks totally out of place on the Janis I've gotten to know over the past few months. "Maybe if she" Janis snaps her fingers. "They've repurposed CY, haven't they? The bit we're carrying around in here, it's used for loading behavior scorefiles and such, but if Hanta's been modifying it to work as a general-purpose boot loader..."
I shudder. The consequences are clear enough. The original Curious Yellow used humans as an infective vector, but only really ran inside A-gates that it had infected. A modified CY that can actually run and do useful stuff inside a host's netlink, and which doesn't trigger the detection patch, is a whole lot scarier. You can do things with it like"The zombies?"
"Yes." Janis looks as if she's seen a ghost. "Are we still in the glasshouse? Or have they relocated us?"
"We're still in the glasshouse," I reassure her. It's the first bit of good news I've been able to piece together so far. "MASucker Harvest Lore, if what she remembers seeing upstairs is anything to go by. I mean, we might have been on a different MASucker, but I thought you accounted for them all?"
"I think so." She nods, increasingly animated. "So that locked area you found in City Hall"when I was being Fiore"is probably the only T-gate on-site. Right?"
"There are the short-range gates to the individual residences." I shiver again: Getting into City Hall and out again without being identified was a matter of sheer brazen luck. Ten minutes later I'd have run into the real Fiore. "They're definitely switched off a hub at City Hall; I found the conference suite they inducted us through. As I recall, on the Grateful for Duration the longjump T-gate was connected to the flight control deck by a direct short-range gate, but was itself stored in a heavily armored pod outside the main pressure hull, in case someone tried to throw a nuke through. So, if we assume they haven't rebuilt the Harvest Lore in flight, there's going to be a way to get to the longjump node from either City Hall or the cathedral, which is just over the road."