He hoped it had nanosecond nightmares.
‘Hi,’ said a thick voice behind him. He stepped back through the sliding glass doors into the bedroom. Janis was sitting up, the duvet hauled around her. She gave him a brief, gummy kiss, then asked for coffee and disappeared again under the quilt. Kohn went into the kitchen and poured two mugs from the just-filled jug on the coffee-maker. Probably the sound and smell had woken her.
‘God,’ Janis said some minutes later. ‘That’s better. Where are we?’
‘Wester Ross, I think,’ Kohn said. ‘There are a dozen other houses just like this one around here. Probably oil-company office-workers’ housing, once.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Eight-thirty-two.’
‘Oh.’ Janis looked at him, eyes quirking. ‘Shouldn’t you put some clothes on?’
‘Not just yet.’
Her disorderly red hair around her on the pillow, her white skin transformed by a mounting flush, her green eyes that did not close even when her mouth opened in that high-g smile that said, we have ignition, we have lift-off…He loved her for all of that.
It was Janis who woke with a start, half an hour after, waking him at the same moment.
‘What—?’
She sat up and looked down at him with a flicker of triumph, a shadow of alarm. ‘I remember now. Dr Nguyen Thanh Van. I knew it sounded familiar!’
Kohn raised himself on one elbow, bringing his skin into range of the warmth of hers. ‘Explain.’
She lay back beside him and stared up at the ceiling, as if reading off it. ‘Nguyen Thanh Van. PhD, University of Hanoi, 2022: Continuing Genetic Effects of Dioxin in the Ben Tre District. Lecturer, Polytechnic Institute of Hue, 2023 to 2027. Currently Projects Coordinator for Da Nang Phytochemicals. Probably one of the sponsors of my research – dammit, I got enough of his offprints! So what’s he doing here with the ANR?’
‘Do you think it was the ANR who broke into your lab?’
‘No, I…What made you think of that? Sounds more likely the more I think about it. Hell, yes. Not the creeps – they’d have wrecked the place. Not academic espionage – they’d have hacked into the data. Not the state – they’d have just marched in and taken it. Somebody who wanted the physical stuff because they couldn’t reproduce it easily, but who knew what to do with it. But why would they do it? They’re not anti-tech.’
‘The crank raid on the AI block at the same time, could that just have been a coincidence?’ Kohn moved his fingertip around on her impressively flat belly, as if doodling. ‘Or a joint action? Nah, that’d be too cynical – the ANR really hates the cranks. Now why do they hate them – ah-ha! Got it!’
‘Ouch.’
‘Sorry. It’s like this, see. The ANR is heavily into the Cable – it’s the Republic’s baby after all – not to mention the Black Plan. After the state and security systems, their worst enemy has got to be Donovan’s campaign of nasty infections. So they must at the very least keep a close watch on CLA activities, actual and virtual. Uh-huh. They knew about that raid and used the opportunity.’
Janis shrugged. ‘OK, but I still don’t see why they should be interested in my research.’
‘Because it was part of their research?’ Kohn sat up with a jolt, then turned around and caught Janis’s shoulders. ‘Could the whole thing have been meant for me, planned all along? Could your whole damn project have been set up just to jog my fucking memory?’
‘No,’ Janis said. ‘That’s crazy. That’s just too paranoid.’
He wasn’t reassured. He felt his stomach muscles and his jaw tense, and willed them to relax. He rolled away on to his back and let his arm flop over the side of the bed. His fingertips touched the gun.
The gun! He put one hand on the floor and with the other heaved the gun on to the bed and across his knees.
‘Wha—’ Janis sat up too as Moh hooked up the weapon’s comm gear and fumbled for his glades.
‘Your project was the last thing I sent the gun’s programs chasing after,’ he explained, ‘before this all started and the weird stuff got downloaded…Never thought to ask it what it found.’
‘Find project definition/Taine/Brunel,’ he told it.
‘Hey, that might be—’
White light flared in the glades; white noise blared in the phones. Kohn cursed and ducked and pushed the equipment off his head.
‘—risky,’ Janis finished. ‘Are you all right?’
‘What the hell was that?’
‘Watchdog proggie,’ Janis said. She sounded mildly amused. ‘One of those university in-house security jobs you were so cutting about. Your gun must’ve saved it.’
Kohn rubbed his eyes and ears. ‘Wipe that!’ he snarled at the gun, which was still wasting power setting his teeth on edge. The distant-sounding screech stopped.
‘Anything behind that shield?’ he asked the gun.
‘Not…translatable,’ came from the tiny speaker, with what sounded like effort.
‘So much for that.’
Janis had stolen the bedcover again. ‘What about going round the back?’ she suggested. ‘Could you call Jordan from here, see if he could hack it?’
Kohn scanned the room and spotted the familiar white plastic plate of a net-port low down on one of the walls. ‘I could if I wanted to,’ he said slowly, ‘but…I left a message for him to get off the case and get on with his life, and I’ve taken the gun off-line even from shortwave, because…well, the rumour I heard is that some levels of security might be unreliable, right? That was why the femininists were so coy about contact. Small risk, yeah, but it ain’t worth it.’
Janis looked back at him silently. He laid a cold hand on her warm shoulder and squeezed gently.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get up, let’s see what our new republic has in store for us.’
The house had only the most basic supplies. Something in the smell of the place told that it hadn’t been occupied recently. In a small room upstairs, at a window overlooking the loch, was a desk with a terminal. Kohn looked at the terminal and looked away again, out of the window. Below, the village was silent, a silence broken after a few minutes by the distant note of the humvee, coming closer.
Janis appeared, towelling her hair.
‘Soft water,’ she said. ‘Now what do we do about breakfast?’
Moh pointed out of the window. ‘I think it’s on its way.’
When the humvee pulled up they went downstairs and stood blinking in the sunlight, screwing up their eyes to see MacLennan and Van standing on the doorstep. They were both wearing chinos and open-necked shirts and carrying large brown paper bags.
‘Breakfast, citizens,’ MacLennan said.
‘Thanks,’ Kohn said, the smell of fresh rolls and bacon reminding him of how long it had been since he’d eaten. ‘Come on in.’
Kohn and MacLennan dragged a table and four chairs out on the veranda. Van, who seemed familiar with the layout of the house, helped Janis find plates and cutlery. While they were eating, the two ANR cadres pointedly avoided talking about anything more than the weather and the food. Van smoked Marlboros, more or less between bites. Kohn accepted one after he’d finished eating. MacLennan tilted his chair back and began filling a pipe. Janis moved upwind of all three, arm-hopped her backside on to the veranda railing and leaned forward, elbows on knees.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘Well, indeed,’ MacLennan said. He had a strong Highland or perhaps Island accent, both guttural and nasal, a carrier-wave white noise behind his speech. ‘You want some explanations. So do we. We are not at all happy with what’s been going on in the system in recent days. Not at all,’ he repeated slowly, jabbing with the stem of his pipe and beetling his brows at Kohn. ‘What – have – you – done?’