Wills brought his tray of dinner to the table where Janis sat with three other soldiers. Most of the light in the canteen was the glow from the kitchen at the far end of it. They all had their glades on. The false colours of the food were unappetizing, but the smell overrode that. They ate quickly, from habit.
After a while Wills said, ‘You were right, you know, Taine.’
She looked up, wiping her plate with bread. ‘I know.’
Political discussion was free in this army. Janis hadn’t felt the need to take part in any until now. She was still reluctant, unwilling to take her mind away from the memory of that shocking, familiar voice. But it was not to be avoided – it was part of what the memory meant.
‘Why do we have to do it?’ she said. ‘Don’t think I’m soft. I got good reason to despise these people. But why can’t we just leave the barb alone if they leave us alone? Why do we have to force them to take sides when most of them will choose the other side?’
‘It’s civil war,’ Wills said. ‘There’s no neutrality. They think the same way. What harm had that poor bastard done to them?’
Janis pushed her plate away. There was still some meat on it. She lit a cigarette. Nearly all the comrades smoked. She’d accepted one cigarette, once, in a tense moment, and then another…Moh had been right about life-expectancy.
‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘maybe he tried to make them take sides, and they saw that as harm.’
The others at the table shifted. She could hear the quiet rattle and clink of gear. Somebody snorted.
‘You’re something of a new citizen yourself, aren’t you, Taine?’ Wills said in a low voice.
The gun was solid and heavy between her feet. Silence rippled outwards across the room.
She looked at Wills, and saw someone standing behind him. Another cadre, she thought, come swiftly to calm the situation. She glanced away from Wills to see who it was.
Moh’s mocking eyes looked back at her, his slyly smiling lips mouthed the single word ‘Remember’, and then no one was there. She felt the tiny hairs on her face and neck prickle, vestigial response to a glacial chill.
Remember.
‘Civis Britannicus sum,’ she said. She spread her hands, keeping them in plain sight, relaxed except for the fingers that held her cigarette: she saw the small smoke-rings rise from their trembling. ‘You’re right, Wills, I don’t know what it was like all these years. I didn’t feel the Betrayal like some of you.’ She leaned back and drew again on her cigarette. ‘I remember a man who did.’ She smiled as she said it, shaking inside.
Wills nodded. ‘All right, Taine. Uncalled-for.’ She knew that for him this counted as a deep apology. He looked at her as if he knew what she was talking about. ‘All been there, what?’ He looked around the table. ‘Gens una sumus.’
Later somebody found a dusty guitar in a cupboard and carried it high into the canteen, and they sang songs from the war and the revolution, songs of their own Republic and of others, “Bandiera Rossa” and “Alba” and “The Men Behind the Wire” and “The Patriot Game”.
Janis sang along, holding the rifle across her lap like the man held the guitar. She looked at all the faces in the dim light, as if looking for another face, and thought she saw it.
That night she lay awake until fatigue overcame her rage and grief.
Several times over the next days she saw him again, and heard him: a yell of warning, a mutter of advice, a pattern of light and shadow under trees.
Sometimes clear, solid-looking, out in the open.
She did not believe this was happening. Not to her. She told herself, again and again, that it was the strain of the fighting. It was not her sanity that was strained, not her philosophy that was flawed. Only her perceptions were at fault, her eyes too accustomed to seeking out hidden shapes.
A day came when she saw him out of the corner of her eye, striding along beside her.
‘Go away,’ she said.
He went away. At the next resting-place she sat a few metres from the others and took the glades off to wipe her eyes. When she put them back on he was standing in front of her, looking down at her with concern.
‘Janis, let me talk to you.’
‘Oh, Moh!’ It was not fair to come back like that.
‘I’m not Moh,’ he said sadly.
‘Then who the hell are you?’
He smiled and got down beside her and lay on his side, facing her. She reached out and her hand went through him. She beat the grass and wept, and took the glades off. He was no longer there, but when she replaced them again he returned.
‘Aha,’ she said.
‘Don’t let anyone see you talking to yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ll hear you just as well if you subvocalize.’
She turned and lay face-down on the grass, murmuring, sometimes glancing sideways to reassure herself that he was still with her. Her heart hammered with a wild hope.
‘You’re in the gun, aren’t you? Did you – did you upload into it?’
‘I’m in the gun,’ he said. ‘But I’m not Moh. I’m the AI in the gun. I…found myself…in the gun just after Moh died. I have memories of Moh, I have routines to imitate him perfectly – his voice, his appearance.’ He chuckled wickedly. ‘And in other ways, with the right equipment. The gun had a huge amount of stored information about Moh, and I can use it to project a – a persona. But don’t kid yourself, Janis, I’m not even his ghost.’
‘You’re his fetch.’
‘You could say that.’
She chewed a blade of grass and thought about how Moh had talked to the gun, how he had talked about the gun. The gun had sometimes acted independently, unpredictably. A mind of its own, awakening in the bolted-on hardware and pirated software, in conversation with a man, interacting with…
‘The Watchmaker!’ she said. ‘That’s where you got the awareness from.’ And in that case, indirectly, from Moh.
Moh’s image frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Perhaps it came from Moh himself.’ And in that case…
‘Oh, Janis, I know why you’re doing this, but please, don’t. Moh is dead.’
‘And you’re alive.’
‘So it would seem.’
‘Son of a gun.’ She looked at him and smiled. ‘And you know more about him than I do. So maybe more of him has survived than he ever expected. “Death is not lived through.”’
The fetch was silent for a moment. ‘I should know.’
Her comrades were getting ready to move off again.
‘What are we going to do now?’ Janis whispered.
‘Next place you can find a comms port,’ the fetch said, ‘jack me in.’
She stared, seeing for the first time the shadowy, unreal quality of the image of the fetch, for all its apparent solidity. ‘What about Donovan’s viruses? Aren’t you vulnerable to them?’
‘Not any more,’ the fetch said. ‘The Kalashnikov firmware protected me from them in the first instance, and I have not been idle. We have a score to settle with Donovan.’
‘Oh yes,’ Janis said. She felt a murderous, barbarous, bloodthirsty joy. ‘Yes. We do.’
Two days later the chance came, in an office block with all its windows out but with its power still functioning, its communications intact. Her unit occupied and guarded it, and as soon as her watch was over, at sunset when she was supposed to be resting, she climbed up a few floors. Glass crunched underfoot in the corridors, sodden carpet squelched in the open-plan office. Desks, terminals, modems, ports. Postcards, notices, family holos and silly mottoes on the desks; revolting green moulds growing out of coffee mugs. Somewhere a fridge hummed, but it had long since lost its battle against decay. She lit a cigarette to smother the stink and spread her parka on a soggy swivel chair. She laid the gun in front of her on the desk, unspooled the cable thread and jacked in. A flicker of interface interference, then everything became clear.