Kohn looked morosely at the little pile of processors: dull glitter, sharp edges – a scatter of fool’s gold. ‘Terabytes,’ he said. ‘Passive data storage, most of it. Encrypted, too. Damn.’
He slotted them back together, one by one, and slammed the final assembly into place like a magazine. Lights winked as systems checked in; drives purred and fell silent. It was ready.
‘Can you still rely on it?’ Janis asked.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘That isn’t a worry. You can’t corrupt AK firmware. Been tried. Im-fucking-possible. Nah, I’ll tell you what’s worrying. It’s who else could be relying on it.’
She sighed and put her elbows on the table, held her chin in her hands. ‘Let’s try and get this straight,’ she said. ‘Whatever happened back there, somebody or something downloaded scads of data to your gun’s memory, and you think it’s using the gun’s own software to guard it?’
He saw the light in her eyes, the heat in her cheeks, and knew it had nothing to do with them: it was the feral excitement of tracking down an idea. He felt it himself.
‘That makes sense,’ he said admiringly.
‘And not just the software,’ she went on. ‘It’s guarding it with the gun, and with—’
Her teeth flashed momentarily: Got it.
‘Yes,’ he said. He saw it too. ‘With my life.’
He hauled himself to his feet. Better to look down at that gaze she was giving him, that scientific and speculative examination.
He shrugged and stretched. ‘So what’s new?’ he said. ‘The hell with it. I’m hungry.’
They returned to the long room to find a dozen young adults and a couple of kids eating and talking around the table. Janis felt her mouth flood, her belly contract at the smell and sight of chicken korma and rice.
Everybody stopped talking and looked at her.
‘Janis Taine,’ Kohn announced. ‘A guest. A person who’s put herself under our protection. And a good lady.’ He put an arm around her shoulder. ‘Come on, sit down.’
After a moment two vacant places appeared at the table. As soon as she sat Janis found a heaped plate and a glass of wine in front of her. She ate, exchanging nods and smiles and occasionally words as Kohn introduced the others: Stone, tall with a building worker’s build and hands, who had worked with Moh to establish the Collective; Mary Abid, who’d found life too peaceful back home after the stories she’d heard from her grandfather; Alasdair Hamilton, a slow-voiced Hebridean demolition man; Dafyd ap Huws, a former ANR cadre…They looked the most reassuringly dangerous bunch of nice people she’d ever met.
They didn’t ask her about herself, or even mention her call of that afternoon (some etiquette applied), so she didn’t tell. She occasionally glanced sideways at Moh, who just grinned awkwardly back when he caught her eye. He looked tired, running on emergency; grim when he didn’t know anyone was looking at him. After the meal finished he took a couple of Golds and broke them up to build a large joint, with the same detached mechanical competence he’d shown when reassembling the gun. She waved the joint past her to Stone.
Stone drew on the smoke and blew it out past his nostrils and said, ‘OK, Moh, we’re waiting.’
One of the children was taking the plates away. Janis turned from puzzling at the puzzled look her thanks brought, hearing her last word, ‘anyway…’, hang on a sudden silence around the table. Moh lit a cigarette and tilted back his chair.
‘Comrades,’ he said, ‘we are in deep shit.’ He rocked forward, elbows on the table, looking everyone in the eye. ‘First off, Janis here. She’s a scientist. She’s come here to get away from Stasis, and from whoever put some demons down the wire to her lab. So…I’m giving her close protection, yeah, and we’re gonna be away from here, but everybody keep that in mind. Don’t want to say any more about that, so don’t nobody ask.
‘Next little problem, and this is where the good music starts, is…last night I winged Cat. She’s OK, right, no worries. But she was on a crank bomb team. Talked to her in hospital, and it looks like the Left Alliance have put their muscle where their mouth’s been for a long time, about gan-gin up with the greens and all that lot. Big push coming. We’re talking, like, soon. Weeks, days. Plus the ANR. Cat was going on about them holding out – you know what she’s like. My guess is it’s only a matter of time before they come to some kind of arrangement.
‘You don’t need me to tell you this puts us in a bit of a sticky position.’ He laughed as if to himself. ‘Sticky position, hah, that’s a good one.’ He was standing now, leaning his fists on the table. ‘What I want to know is, why the fuck did we not know about this?’
He sat down again, turned to Janis and added, in a tone of casual explanation: ‘Felix Dzerzhinsky Collective, my ass.’
The argument went on from there.
If Moh had hoped to divert them into mutual recrimination over a setback on the intelligence front, he didn’t succeed for long. Most of them insisted they’d logged all the rumours they’d run across, and found them evaluated as just that: rumours.
What really agitated them was the prospect of more situations like the one Moh had unwittingly found himself in, of shooting at people who, in terms of their political affiliations and personal relations, were on the same side as themselves. Much of the increasingly heated discussion went past Janis’s ears, but she could see a polarization taking place: Moh, Dafyd and Stone took the view that it changed nothing, while Mary and Alasdair argued for calling off any engagements that would bring them into conflict with the Left. The others were being pulled one way or the other. Moh, to her surprise and relief, contributed little to the debate other than the odd sardonic laugh or dry chuckle, such as when someone used the expression ‘what these comrades fail to understand…’.
But it was Moh who brought the discussion to an end, with a cough and a slight shrug of his shoulders.
He stood up again. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘we can’t take a vote now, too many of us’re out on active. What I propose is this: as a co-op we honour existing contracts. Any individual members who find they have a problem with defending particular installations, ask to be relieved beforehand. Anyone who takes an assignment and then bottles out is considered to have gone independent and takes full liability. And let’s get this in perspective, OK? We’ve always used minimum force.’
He paused, as if trying to work something out, then continued. ‘My conscience is clear. One more thing: if this goes beyond isolated sabbing and turns into a real offensive, all bets are off. That’s in the small print of all our contracts anyway. Everyone go along with that?’
They did, though Alasdair was the last and most reluctant to nod agreement.
‘What about if there is an ANR offensive?’ Dafyd asked. Everyone else laughed. He looked offended. Moh leaned over and grasped his shoulder.
‘If that happens, man,’ he said, ‘we do exactly what it says in the contract; we give our full support to the legitimate authorities!’
As Janis watched the laughter, the visible relaxation that this comment brought, she reflected on what it meant. Not its literal meaning but its studied ambiguity – Moh, or somebody, must have taken great delight in smuggling that clause into the small print. With all their disagreements, with their obvious cynicism and scepticism about the ANR, they took it for granted that its aims and arms were just.
As did she: it was an underlying premise, now that she came to think of it, for most of the people she knew. Long before they had come to power the Republicans had referred to the British state, the old establishment, as ‘the Hanoverian regime’, and now, long after the Republic’s fall, everybody called the restored Kingdom by that derisory name. Few took seriously the ANR’s claim to be the legal government, but few dismissed it entirely. In its controlled zones, dispersed and remote, and in the back of people’s minds, the Republic still existed. It had hegemony. That much it had already won.