For a minute or so Frank blanked. There was a horrible noise, a screeching roar in his ears — blood on his hands, blood on his knees, blood everywhere, an ocean to Phibul’s dried-up creek. He was dizzy and cold and the hand holding his didn’t seem to help. It seemed to want to let go. Alice in the bar downstairs. Alice explaining the facts of life to him after bribing a government official, joking about the honeymoon suite when they moved in. Alice flying drones over the cityscape far below, spotting traffic, spotting likely hot spots with a look on her face like -
There was shouting beyond the balcony. Shouting, and a grinding metallic squeal he’d heard before, down below. Alice was dead and he was stranded with a dried-up swimming pool, a stranger from Turku, and no way to make the fuckers pay. No real-time link.
“You can’t do anything for her.” There was a hand on his shoulder, small and hard — he shook it loose, then pushed himself to his knees dizzily.
“I know,” he heard someone else say. “I wish—” His voice cracked. He didn’t really know what that person wished anymore: it wasn’t really relevant, was it? He hadn’t been in love with Alice, but he’d trusted her; she was the brains of the operation, the wise older head who knew what the hell to do. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The head of mission wasn’t supposed to die in the field, brains splattered all over the roof by -
“Keep down,” Thelma whispered. “I think they’re going to start now.”
“Start?” he asked, shivering.
A hush fell across the square, then the noise of the crowd redoubled. And there was another sound; a pattering, like rain falling onto concrete from a clear blue sky, accompanied by a crackling roar. Then the screams. “Alice was right,” said Thelma, shuddering and crouching down below the parapet. Sweating and whey-faced, she looked the way Frank felt. “It’s the season for bullets.”
Below them, in the packed dusty square before the government buildings, the storm drains began to fill with blood.
Svengali had drunk half a bottle of single malt by the time Frank reached the massacre. His throat was hoarse, but he hadn’t stopped for long enough to ask for a refill. It hurt too much to pause. Now he held his glass out. “I don’t know how your liver copes with that.”
“He’s got the guts of a rat,” slurred Eloise: “hepatic alcohol dehydrogenase pathway and all.” She stood up, wobbling slightly. “’Scuse me, guys, but this isn’t my night for partying after all. Nice of you to invite me and maybe some other time and all, but I think I’m going to be having nightmares tonight.” She hit the release button on the doorframe and was gone into the twilight of the ship’s crew accommodation deck.
Svengali shook his head as he pulled the door shut. “And here I was, hoping for a threesome,” he said. He tipped a generous measure into Frank’s glass, then put the rapidly emptying bottle down. “So, the troops massacred the demonstrators. What has this got to do with those guys, whoever they are?”
“The—” Frank swallowed bile. “Remember the spook woman? She came back, after the massacre, with soldiers. And Thelma’s camera. She let Thelma scan the courtyard, then the guards sat her down with a gun at her head and the spook dictated my copy to me. Which I signed and submitted under my own name.”
“You—” Svengali’s eyes narrowed. “Isn’t that unethical?”
“So is threatening to execute hostages. What would you do in my shoes?”
“Hmm.” The clown topped off his own glass and took a full mouthful. “So you sent it, in order to…”
“Yeah. But it didn’t work.” He fell silent. Nothing was going to make him go into the next bit, the way they’d cuffed him, stuck needles full of interface busters in his arm to kill off his implants, and flipped him on his stomach to convulse, unable to look away or even close his eyes while they gut-shot Phibul and left him to bleed out, while two of the soldiers raped Thelma, then cut off her screams and then her breasts with their bayonets. Of the three of them, only Frank’s agency had bought him a full war correspondent’s insurance policy.
It had been the beginning of a living nightmare for Frank, a voyage through the sewers of the New Settlement’s concentration camps that only ended nine months later, when the bastards concluded that ensuring his silence was unnecessary and the ransom from his insurers was a bigger asset than his death through destructive labor. “I think they thought I was sleeping with her,” he said fuzzily.
“So you got away? They released you?”
“No: I ended up in the camps. They didn’t realize at first, the Newpeace folk who supported the Peace Enforcement, that those camps were meant for everyone, not just the fractious unemployed and the right-to-land agitators. But sooner or later everyone ended up there — everyone except the security apparat and the off-planet mercenaries the provisional government hired to run the machine. Who were all smartly turned-out, humorless, efficient, fast — like those kids in the bar. Just like them. And then there were the necklaces.”
“Necklaces?” Svengali squinted. “Are you shitting me?”
“No.” Frank shuddered and took a mouthful of whisky. “Try to pull it off, try to go somewhere you’re not supposed to, or just look at a guard wrong, and it’ll take your head off.” He rubbed the base of his throat, unconsciously. And then there was Processing Site Administrator Voss, but let’s not go there. “They killed three thousand people in the square, you know that? But they killed another two million in those camps over the next three years. And the fuckers got away with it. Because anyone who knows about them is too shit-scared to do anything. And it all happened a long time ago and a long way away. The first thing they did was pin down all the causal channels, take control of any incoming STL freighters, and subject all real-time communications in and out of the system to censorship. You can emigrate — they don’t mind that — but only via slower-than-light. Emigrants talk, but most people don’t pay attention to decades-old news. It’s just not current anymore,” he added bitterly. “When they decided to cash in my insurance policy they deported me via slower-than-light freighter. I spent twenty years in cold sleep: by the time I arrived nobody wanted to know what I’d been through.”
And it had been a long time before he’d been ready to seek the media out for himself: he’d spent six months in a hospital relearning that if a door was open, it meant he could go through it if he wanted, instead of waiting for a guard to lock it again. Six months of pain, learning again how to make decisions for himself. Six months of remembering what it was to be an autonomous human being and not a robot made out of meat, trapped in the obedient machinery of his own body.
“Okay. So they … what? Go around conquering worlds? That sounds insane. Pardon me for casting aspersions on your good self’s character, but it is absolutely ridiculous to believe anyone could do such a thing. Destroy a world, yes, easily — but conquer one?”
“They don’t.” Frank leaned back against the partition. “I’m not sure what they do. Rumor in the camps was, they call themselves the ReMastered. But just what that means … Hell, there are rumors about everything from brainwashing to a genetically engineered master race. But the first rule of journalism is you can’t trust unsubstantiated rumors. All I know is, this ship is going to Newpeace, which they turned into a hellhole. And those guys are from somewhere called Tonto. What the fuck is going on?”