‘Oh, I know that,’ the girl said. She shuffled and looked at everything except her visitors.
‘Guess we better go,’ Moh said. ‘All the best.’
When they were halfway back down the track Janis asked: ‘How could she see the flash with her eyes shut?’
‘Laser-fuser warhead. She’d see it.’
Moh’s phone beeped. He listened, nodding. ‘OK, right, see ya.’
‘What’s up?’
‘MacLennan’s coming to meet us. Says there’s been some developments.’
A kilometre and a half away, a humvee started up.
Cat slept, lightly curled on her side. Some of the alertness, the knowingness, of her characteristic expression was relaxed away, so that she seemed a younger person who hadn’t discovered sex and violence. Jordan, propped on one elbow, looked at that face over the curve of her shoulder, basked in the skin-to-skin human warmth, his breathing careful so as not to disturb the spontaneous rhythm of hers.
Something in him had changed – some baseline had shifted with that release, that bonding. Until now he’d felt like a fellow-traveller of the human race, a sympathizer rather than a paid-up, card-carrying member. Now, as the bars of morning sunlight from the armour-slatted window millimetred their way across the ceiling, he still had the same ideas but with a different attitude. Still an individualist, but without the edgy selfishness. At a level beneath all calculation of advantage he was no longer afraid of dying. It was he who had opened, encompassed and received, and now found for the first time within his fiercely defended core a person other than himself.
She woke with a wild where-am-I? look, saw him and smiled.
‘You’re still here.’
‘Still here.’
‘You been awake long?’
Jordan shrugged. ‘Some time.’
‘What you been doing?’ She rolled over and put an arm and a leg over him.
‘Watching you sleep.’
Her hand explored. ‘Hmm…that must’ve been exciting.’
‘Not as exciting as seeing you awake.’ She dived.
‘Now you.’
The estuarine smell and taste of it, salt and rank, ocean and swamp.
Then chin to chin, lip to lip, tongue to tongue; pubis to pubis. She grabbed his hand and guided it with urgent precision and abandoned his finger there, a trapped digit doing its little bit between their blind beat. As suddenly she dragged it away, digging her nails into the small of his back and taking him over the edge with her in an arching, bucking, yelling fall.
They landed in a tangled heap.
‘Wuh.’
‘They don’t call you Cat for nothing.’
She grinned and rolled her eyes and ran her tongue along her teeth. Then she sat up and reached for a handful of tissues and, still cat-like, wiped and mopped.
‘I’m going to have a shower,’ she said.
‘Oh good,’ Jordan said. ‘So am I.’
She pushed him away and jumped off the bed.
‘Another time,’ she said. ‘Right now it would be…self-defeating.’
She skipped into the shower stall.
‘Hey, lover,’ she shouted as the water came on, ‘there’s something you can do for me.’
‘Yes?’
‘Get me some breakfast.’
well hi there jordan
Jordan was watching a kettle not boiling when the low, flat, uninflected voice came from the air behind him. He turned in a poor imitation of a fighting crouch and saw the face of the Black Planner on a small television tile propped in a corner of the kitchen counter. He stared open-mouthed for a moment, and the animated line-drawing of a face smiled, apparently in response. One of the telecams on a nearby shelf had a tiny red eye beside its lens’s unwinking stare – he was sure it hadn’t been on before.
sorry to startle you
The voice came from the speakers of the room’s sound system, an eerily perfect reproduction of words that didn’t bother to pretend they came from a human throat.
‘I’m pleased to see you again,’ he said. ‘Thank you for the money. It made a big difference to my life.’
so i understand i have been watching your progress with interest your new girlfriend has no doubt told you that an offensive is imminent
Jordan nodded, dry-mouthed. There was something disturbingly familiar about the face, familiar beyond the fact of his having seen it before. He felt he had encountered it somewhere else. Possibly the Black Planner himself was an ANR cadre who walked unmarked in the streets of Norlonto, a face he’d passed by in the crowd.
do not be offended that she has not told you all she knows this is nothing personal it is because she is basically a good communist loyal daughter of the revolution and mother of the new republic though she would laugh if you said so to her face the offensive is no longer imminent it is current and i again have a proposition for you the risk is considerable and there is no monetary reward however i think you will obtain satisfaction out of the high probability that your actions will result in a very substantial reduction in the human cost of the insurrection do i have your interest
‘Yes.’
i urgently require access to some systems from which i am currently excluded once again it is just a matter of entering a code on a terminal the code in question will follow your agreement to proceed as will the relevant passwords the terminal is the high-security terminal in the office of melody lawson and the time is as soon as you can get there
‘Oh, that terminal.’ He hoped the routines the Planner was manipulating could pick up voice-tones, even if it couldn’t transmit them. ‘And how do you expect me to get back into BC, let alone into the office? And what about getting out again?’
entering the enclave will not be a problem as you shall see if you attempt it as for the office you are to do this by deception if possible and subsequently you are to effect your safe exit by mass agitation if necessary i understand you are a persuasive speaker when you are telling the truth and a plausible liar when you are not comrade duvalier is at this moment being asked to accompany you and her combat skills will provide some backup i can assure you that other disruption will be provided but i do not deny that the risk is considerable on the other hand the risks involved in staying here particularly if your task is not carried out are an order of magnitude greater
It took a moment for Jordan to turn the quiet statement over.
‘You’re saying that doing nothing is ten to a hundred times more dangerous than your crazy scheme?’
correct
‘Well, in that case,’ Jordan said slowly, grinning back at the Planner, ‘it’s all perfectly justifiable selfish cowardice, so I’ll do it.’
you did not think i would ask you to carry out an act of reckless courage did you
The drawn face smiled in a way that made Jordan wish he could talk to the real person behind it.
‘I hope I see you again,’ he said, understanding for the first time something of what the catchphrase meant: afterwards…
goodbye jordan i hope i see you again
Numbers came up.
‘Two bits of news,’ MacLennan said, looking back over his shoulder and taking one hand from the steering-wheel to gesticulate. ‘The first is that the Army Council has decided to go for it. The offensive is under way.’
‘Yee-hah!’ Kohn yelled.
They bumped up a pitted tarmac strip between willows and beeches and turned on to the main road. ‘The second is, we’ve cracked the thing with the Star Fraction.’
‘What?’ Janis leaned forward from the back seat, clutching her seat-belt.
‘The Star Fraction,’ MacLennan repeated, raising his voice. He shifted gears and the engine note dropped. ‘When the systems settled down yesterday we – that is, Doctor Van and some of our security people – got in touch with your friend in outer space.’ He waved a hand skywards, just in case they didn’t know where that was. ‘Logan was quite happy to cooperate. Between them they think they’ve figured it out. We got through to people from the old days who knew Josh, and who have been in this Star Fraction for years without knowing what it was. And without telling anyone,’ he added disgustedly. ‘These God-damned Trotskyites, excuse my English, Doctor Taine. The long and the short of it is that Josh didn’t just prepare for the fall of the Republic, which he had every right to do, but for the fall of civilization itself! He set up these unauthorized programs in the Black Plan to seek out and store biological data, and he compiled a mailing list, would you believe, of people who could make use of it. But he never fired it off, and it just beavered away for two decades getting things ready. A Black Plan inside the Black Plan.’