A light was winking on my head-up display—the emergency short-range, line-of-sight walkie-talkie. When I responded, an electronically distorted voice said, “Are you alone?”
“Absolutely.”
“Who are you?”
I’d stripped all identifying tags from my suit before setting off, but the doppelganger who had killed Debra Thorn and taken her place was pointing a gun at my head and it seemed advisable to tell her my name. She was silent for a moment, no doubt taking a look at my file.
I said, “I’m not the doppelganger of Roy Bruce, if that’s what you’re thinking. The person I killed and replaced was a gene wizard by the name of Sharwal Jah Sharja.”
I briefly told the assassin the story I have already told you. When I was finished, she said,
“You’ve really been working here for eight years?”
“Eight and a half.”
I had made a very bad mistake about my captor’s motives, but I must have piqued her curiosity, for otherwise I would already be dead. And even if I couldn’t talk my way out of this and persuade her to spare me, I still had a couple of weapons she hadn’t found. I risked a lie, said that her net had compromised my suit’s thermal integrity. I told her that I was losing heat to the frozen ground; that I would freeze to death if I didn’t get up.
She told me I could sit up, and to do it slowly.
As I got my feet under me, squatting on my haunches in front of her, I glanced up at the top of the ridge and made a crucial triangulation.
She said, “My instructors told me that I would live no more than a year.”
“Perhaps they told you that you would burn briefly but very brightly—that’s what they told me. But they lied. I expect they lied about a lot of things, but I promise to tell you only the truth. We can leave here, and go anywhere we want to.”
“I have a job to finish. People to kill, riots to start.”
The assassin took a long step sideways to the cart, took something the size of a basketball from the net behind its seat, bowled it towards me. It bounced slowly over the dusty ground and ended up between my legs: the severed head of an old woman, skin burnt black with cold, eyes capped by frost.
“The former leader of the parliament of Sparta, Tethys,” the assassin said. “I left the body pinned to the ground in one of the fields where her friends work, with an amusing little message.”
“You are trying to start a war amongst the prisoners. Perhaps the people who sent you here are hoping that the scandal will close the facility. Perhaps they think it is the only chance they’ll have of freeing their comrades. Who are you working for, by the way?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” the assassin said.
I asked her how she would escape when she was finished. “There’s a special team on the way. If you’re still here when they arrive, they’ll hunt you down and kill you.”
“So that’s why you came after me. You were frightened that this team would find you while they were hunting me.”
She may have been young, but she was smart and quick.
I said, “I came because I wanted to talk to you. Because you’re like me.”
“Because after all these years of living amongst humans, you miss your own kind, is that it?”
Despite the electronic distortion, I could hear the sneer in the assassin’s voice. I said carefully, “The people who sent you here—the people who made you—have no plans to extract you when you are finished here. They do not care if you survive your mission. They only care that it is successful. Why give your loyalty to people who consider you expendable? To people who lied to you? You have many years of life ahead of you, and it isn’t as hard to disobey your orders as you might think. You’ve already disobeyed them, in fact, when you reached out to me. All you have to do is take one more step, and let me help you. If we work together, we’ll survive this. We’ll find a way to escape.”
“You think you’re human. You’re not. You’re exactly like me. A walking dead man. That’s what our instructors called us, by the way: the dead. Not ‘Dave.’ Not anything cute. When we were being moved from one place to another, they’d shout out a warning: ‘Dead men walking.’”
It is the traditional warning when a condemned person is let out of their cell. Fortunately, I’ve never worked in Block H, where prisoners who have murdered or tried to murder fellow inmates or guards await execution, so I’ve never heard or had to use it.
The assassin said, “They’re right, aren’t they? We’re made things, so how can we be properly alive?”
“I’ve lived a more or less ordinary life for ten years. If you give this up and come with me, I’ll show you how.”
“You stole a life, just as I did. Underneath your disguise, you’re a dead man, just like me.”
“The life I live now is my own, not anyone else’s,” I said. “Give up what you are doing, and I’ll show you what I mean.”
“You’re a dead man,” the assassin said. “You’re breathing the last of your air. You have less than an hour left. I’ll leave you to die here, finish my work, and escape in the confusion. After that, I’m supposed to be picked up, but now I think I’ll pass on that. There must be plenty of people out there who need my skills. I’ll work for anyone who wants some killing done, and earn plenty of money.”
“It’s a nice dream,” I said, “but it will never come true.”
“Why shouldn’t I profit from what I was made to do?”
“I’ve lived amongst people for more than a decade. Perhaps I don’t know them as well as I should, but I do know that they are very afraid of us. Not because we’re different, but because we’re so very much like a part of them they don’t want to acknowledge. Because we’re the dark side of their nature. I’ve survived this long only because I have been very careful to hide what I really am. I can teach you how to do that, if you’ll let me.”
“It doesn’t sound like much of a life to me,” the assassin said.
“Don’t you like being Debra Thorn?” I said.
And at the same moment I kicked off the ground, hoping that by revealing that I knew who she was I’d distracted and confused her, and won a moment’s grace.
In Ariel’s microgravity, my standing jump took me high above the assassin’s head, up and over the edge of the ridge. As I flew up, I discharged the taser dart I’d sewn into the palm of one of my pressure suit’s gloves, and the electrical charge stored in its super-conducting loop shorted out every thread of myoelectric plastic that bound my arms. I shrugged off the net as I came down and kicked off again, bounding along the ridge in headlong flight towards the bulging face of the cliff wall and a narrow chimney pinched between two folds of black, rock-hard ice.
I was halfway there when a kinetic round struck my left leg with tremendous force and broke my thigh. I tumbled headlong, caught hold a low pinnacle just before I went over the edge of the ridge. The assassin’s triumphant shout was a blare of electronic noise in my ears; because she was using the line-of-sight walkie-talkie I knew that she was almost on me. I pushed up at once and scuttled towards the chimney like a crippled ape. I had almost reached my goal when a second kinetic round shattered my right knee.
My suit was ruptured at the point of impact and I felt a freezing pain as the smart fabric constricted as tightly as a tourniquet, but I was not finished. The impact of the kinetic round had knocked me head over heels into a field of ice-blocks, within striking distance of the chimney. As I half-crawled, half-swam towards it, a third round took off the top of a pitted block that might have fallen from the cliffs a billion years ago, and then I was inside the chimney, and started to climb.