It was almost a comfort to realise that Jaal too would probably be lost to him. It was as though he was hanging over some great drop, about to fall, destined to fall, and the greatest pain came from the act of still hanging on, fingers scraping, nails tearing. Let go of this one last thing to cling to, and the fall itself would at least be painless.
He wasn’t going to kill himself. It was grimly good to know he could do it, but he wouldn’t. From a purely practical point of view, he was fairly certain that Hatherence had followed him, using her esuit’s military capabilities to hide herself from his gascraft’s senses. She’d try to stop him. It could get undignified, and she might even succeed. If he really wanted to kill himself, he was sure there were easier ways. Just heading deeper into the war zone and powering hard straight for a Dreadnought should do the job.
And it would be too easy. It would be selfish. It would be the end to this terrible, gnawing feeling of guilt, a line drawn under that, and he didn’t think that he deserved such an easy way out. He felt guilty? So feel guilty. He had meant no harm — quite the opposite — he’d just been wrong. Feeling guilty was stupid. It was understandable, but it was stupid, just beside the point. They were dead and he was alive. His actions might well have led directly to their deaths, but he hadn’t killed them.
What was left? Revenge, maybe. Though who to blame? If it really had been Beyonders, that made his old treachery (or principled, self-sacrificing stand, depending) look foolish somehow. He still despised the Mercatoria, hated the whole vicious, cretinous, vacuously self-important, sentience-hating system, and he’d never had any illusions about the unalloyed niceness of the Beyonders or any other large group, or thought that a struggle against the Mercatoria would be other than prolonged, painful and bloody. He’d always known that his own end might be painful and long-drawn-out — he would do everything he could to make sure it wasn’t, but sometimes there was just nothing you could do. He had also realised that innocents died just as filthily and in equally great numbers in a just war as they did in an unjust one, and had known that war was to be avoided at almost all costs just because it magnified mistakes, exaggerated errors, but still he’d hoped there would somehow be an elegance about his involvement in the struggle against the Mercatoria, a degree of gloriousness, a touch of the heroic.
Instead: muddle, confusion, stupidity, insane waste, pointless pain, misery and mass death — all the usual stuff of war, affecting him as it might affect anybody else, without any necessary moral reason, without any justice and even without any vindictive-ness, just through the ghastly, banal working-out of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, orbital mechanics and the shared nature of sentient beings existing and contending.
Perhaps he had brought it all down upon them. Never mind advising Slovius to get away from the Autumn House: his delve, his famous delve, the action of meeting Valseir and trading information might have produced all this. It might all be his fault. Taking all he’d been told at face value, it was.
He tried to laugh, but the gillfluid filling his mouth and throat and lungs wouldn’t let him, not properly. “Oh, come on then,” be tried to say into the gassy skies of Nasqueron (it came out as a hopeless mumble), “show me it’s all a sim, prove the Cessona’s right. End run. Game over. Lift me out.”
Still all just a mumble, a gurgling somewhere down in his throat as he half stood, half lay there in his coffin-shaped alcove in the little hovering gascraft, poised within the gas-giant’s atmosphere at a place where a human could expose themselves to the elements and not die too quickly, if they had something to breathe.
Revenge was a poor way out too, he thought through his tears. It was human nature, it was creat nature, it would be in the nature of almost any being capable of feeling angry and injured, but it was nearly as poor a way out as suicide. Self-serving, self-centred, selfish. Yes, if he was set in front of whoever had ordered the lobbing of a nuke at a house complex full of unarmed, unwarned civilians, he’d be tempted to kill them if he could, but it would not bring the dead back.
He never would have the opportunity, of course — again, reality scarcely ever worked that neatly — but if, in theory, he was presented with the chance, the fabled they’re-tied-to-a-chair-and-you’ve-got-a-gun scenario, able to hurt or kill whoever had killed most of those he’d loved, he might do it. There was an argument that it would only make him as bad as them, but then he knew that in a way he was already just as bad as them. The only moral reason for doing it would be to rid the world, the galaxy, the universe of one self-evidently bad person. As though there would ever be a shortage, as though that wouldn’t just leave the same niche for another.
And it would be a military machine, a hierarchy involved here, anyway. The responsibility would almost certainly diffuse out from whoever — or whatever group — had drawn up the relevant strategy through to whoever had given some probably vague order down to whoever had drawn up the general and specific targeting criteria, on down to some schmuck grunt or thoughtless technician who’d pressed a button or tapped a screen or thought-clicked an icon floating in a holo tank. And doubtless that individual would be a product of the usual hammer-subtle military induction and indoctrination process, breaking the individual down and building them back up again into a usefully obedient semi-automatic asset, sentimental towards their closest comrades, loyal only to some cold code. And, oh, how utterly sure you would have to be that they really were responsible in the first place, that you weren’t being fooled by whoever had arranged all this tying-to-a-chair stuff and equipped you with a gun in the first place.
Maybe automatics had slotted in the final target programming. Was he supposed to track down the programmer too and tie him up with whoever had given the attack-authorisation or dreamed up the whole wizzo plan for visiting Ulubis in the first place?
If it had really been Beyonders, it might have been an AI which was responsible for the deed, for who-knew-what reason. Why, he’d have to find it, turn the durn thing off. Though wasn’t the Mercatoria’s murderous attitude to AIs one of the reasons he hated it so much?
And maybe, of course, it had all been their mistake and his fault. Perhaps they’d thought they were going to hit an empty house and only his idiot advice, his meddling, had filled it with people. How to apportion the blame there?
His eyes were bad now, like sand had been thrown in them. He couldn’t really see anything, the tears were so thick. (He could still see via the collar, which was a strange experience, the tipped, clear view of the arrowhead’s senses overlaid on his body’s own.) He couldn’t kill himself. He had to go on, see what could be done, pay tribute, try to make up, try to leave the place even fractionally better than he’d found it, try to do whatever good he might be capable of.