In the wake of the quote, no one said anything. I scanned the faces in the room, trying to reckon support against dislike and the shades of gray between. Sierra Tres cranked one expressive eyebrow and stayed silent. Sanction IV, fucking Sanction IV, hung in the air about me. You could make a good case for my actions there being governed by fear and greed. Some of the faces I was watching already had.
Then again, none of them was there.
None of them was fucking there.
Brasil stood up. He searched the faces around the table, maybe for the same things I’d been looking at.
“Think about this, all of you. It will affect us all, one way or the other. Each one of you is here because I trust you to keep your mouth shut, and because if there’s something to be done I trust you to help me do it. There’ll be another meeting tonight at sundown. There’ll be a vote. Like I said, give it some thought.”
Then he picked up his saxophone from a stool by the window and ambled out of the room as if there were nothing more important going on in his life at that moment.
After a couple of seconds, Virginia Vidaura got up and went out after him.
She didn’t look at me at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Brasil found me again later, on the beach.
He came trudging up out of the surf with the board slung under one arm, body stripped to shorts, scar tissue, and sprayon ankle boots, raking the sea out of his hair with his free hand. I lifted an arm in greeting, and he broke into a jog toward where I sat in the sand. No mean feat after the hours he’d had in the water. When he reached me, he was barely breathing heavily.
I squinted up at him in the sun. “Looks like fun.”
“Try?” He touched the surfboard, angled it toward me. Surfers don’t do that, not with a board they’ve owned any longer than a couple of days. And this one looked older than the sleeve that was carrying it.
Jack Soul Brasil. Even here on Vchira Beach, there was no one else much like him.
“Thanks, I’ll pass.”
He shrugged, dug the board into the sand, and flopped down beside me. Water sprang off him in droplets. “Suit yourself. Good swell out there today. Nothing too scary.”
“Must be dull for you.”
A broad grin. “Well, that’s the trap, isn’t it.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah, it is.” He gestured out to sea. “Get in the water, you do every wave for what it’s worth. Lose that, you might as well go back to Newpest. Leave Vchira for good.”
I nodded. “Get many like that?”
“The burnouts? Yeah, some. But leaving’s okay. It’s the ones who stay on that hurt to look at.”
I glanced at the scar tissue on his chest.
“You’re such a sensitive guy, Jack.”
He smiled out at the sea. “Trying to be.”
“That why you won’t do the clone thing, huh? Wear every sleeve for what it’s worth?”
“Learn every sleeve for what it’s worth,” he corrected me gently. “Yeah. Plus you wouldn’t believe what clone storage costs these days, even in Newpest.”
“Doesn’t seem to bother Ado or Tres.”
He grinned again. “Mari’s got an inheritance to spend. You know what her real name is, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I remember. And Tres?”
“Sierra knows people in the trade. When the rest of us packed in the Bug stuff, she went on contracting for the haiduci for a while. She’s owed some favors up in Newpest.”
He shivered slightly, let it run up to a shudder that twitched his shoulders. Sneezed suddenly.
“Still doing that shit, I see. Is that why Ado’s so thin?”
He looked at me oddly. “Ado’s thin because she wants to be thin. How she goes about it is her business, wouldn’t you say?”
I shrugged. “Sure. I’m just curious. I figured you guys would have gotten bored with self-infection by now.”
“Ah, but you never liked it in the first place, did you? I remember last time you were here, when Mari tried to sell you on that batch of HHF we had. You always were a little puritanical on the subject.”
“I just never saw the point of making myself ill for fun. Thought as a trained medic, you’d be at least that smart, too.”
“I’ll remind you of that next time we’re sharing a bad tetrameth comedown. Or a single-malt hangover.”
“It’s not the same.”
“You’re right.” He nodded sagely. “That chemical shit is Stone Age stuff. I ran Hun Home flu against a spec-inhibited immune system for ten years and all I got was buzz and some really cool delirium dreams. Real waveclimbers. No headaches, no major organ damage, not even a runny nose once the inhibitors and the virus meshed. Tell me one drug you could do that with.”
“Is that what you’re running these days? HHF?”
He shook his head. “Not for a long time. Virginia got us some Adoracion custom a while back. Engineered spinal-fever complex. Man, you should see my dreams now. Sometimes I wake up screaming.”
“I’m happy for you.”
For a while, we both watched the figures in the water. A couple of times Brasil grunted and pointed out something in the way one of the surfers moved. None of it meant very much to me. Once he applauded softly as someone wiped out, but when I glanced at him there was no apparent mockery in his face.
A little later he asked me again, gesturing at the pegged board.
“You sure you don’t want to try out? Take my plank? Man, that mothballed shit you’re wearing looks practically made for it. Odd for military custom, come to think of it. Kind of light.” He prodded idly at my shoulder with a couple of fingers. “In fact, I’d say that’s near-perfect sports sleeve trim you’re carrying. What’s the label?”
“Ah, some defunct bunch, never heard of them before. Eishundo.”
“Eishundo?”
I glanced at him, surprised. “Yeah, Eishundo Organics. You know them?”
“Fuck, yeah.” He scooted back in the sand and stared at me. “Tak, that’s a design classic you’re wearing. They only ever built the one series, and it was a century ahead of its time at least. Stuff no one had ever tried before. Gecko grip, recabled muscle structure, autonomic survival systems like you wouldn’t believe.”
“No, I would.”
He wasn’t listening. “Flexibility and endurance through the roof, reflex wiring you don’t start to see again until Harkany got started back in the early three hundreds. Man, they just don’t build them like that anymore.”
“They certainly don’t. They went bust, didn’t they?”
He shook his head vehemently. “Nah, that was politics. Eishundo was a Drava cooperative, set up in the eighties, typical Quiet Quellist types except I don’t think they ever made any big secret of the fact. Would have been shut down probably, but everyone knew they made the best sports sleeves on the planet and they ended up supplying half the brats in the First Families.”
“Handy for them.”
“Yeah, well. Like I said, there was nothing to touch them.” The enthusiasm leached from his face. “Then, with the Unsettlement, they declared for the Quellists. Harlan family never forgave them for that. When it was over they blacklisted everyone who’d ever worked for Eishundo, even executed a few of the senior biotech guys as traitors and terrorists. Providing arms to the enemy, all that tired line of shit. Plus, with the way things turned out at Drava, they were pretty fucked anyway. Man, I can’t believe you’re sitting there wearing that thing. It’s a fucking piece of history, Tak.”
“Well, that’s good to know.”
“You sure you don’t want to—”
“Sell it to you? Thanks, no, I’ll—”
“Surf, man. You sure you don’t want to surf? Take the plank out and get wet? Find out what you can do in that thing?”
I shook my head. “I’ll just live with the suspense.”
He looked at me curiously for a while. Then he nodded and went back to watching the sea. You could fe
el the way just watching it did something for him. Balanced out the fever he’d set raging inside himself. I tried, a little grimly, not to feel envy.
“So maybe some other time,” he said quietly. “When you’re not carrying so much.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” It wasn’t any other time I could usefully imagine, unless he was talking about the past, and I couldn’t see any way to get back there.
He seemed to want to talk.
“You never did this stuff at all, did you? Even back in Newpest?”
I shrugged. “I know how to fall off a plank, if that’s what you mean. Did the local beaches for a couple of summers when I was a kid. Then I started hanging out with a crew and they were strictly subaqua. You know how it goes.”
He nodded, maybe remembering his own Newpest youth. Maybe remembering the last time we’d had this conversation, but I wouldn’t count on it. The last time we’d talked about it was fifty-odd years back, and if you don’t have Envoy recall that’s a long time and a lot of conversations past.
“Fucking stupid,” he muttered. “Who’d you run with?”
“Reef Warriors. Hirata chapter, mostly. Dive Free, Die Free. Leave the Scum on the Surface. We would have cut up guys like you as soon as look at you back then. What about you?”
“Me? Oh, I thought I was a real fucking free spirit. Storm Riders, Standing Wave, Vchira Dawn Chorus. Some others, I don’t remember them all now.” He shook his head. “So fucking stupid.”
We watched the waves.
“How long have you been out here?” I asked him.
He stretched and tipped his head back toward the sun, eyes clenched shut. A sound like a cat purring made its way up out of his chest, broke finally into a chuckle.
“Here on Vchira? I don’t know, I don’t keep track. Got to be close to a century by now, I guess. On and off.”
“And Virginia says the Bugs folded two decades back.”
“Yeah, near enough. Like I said, Sierra still gets out and about occasionally. But most of the rest of us haven’t been in worse than a beach brawl for ten, twelve years.”
“Let’s hope you haven’t gotten rusty then.”
He flipped another grin at me. “You take a lot for granted.”
I shook my head. “No, I just listen carefully. It will affect us all, one way or the other? You got that right. You’re going to go with this, whatever the others do. You think it’s for real.”
“Oh yeah?” Brasil lay back flat on the sand and closed his eyes. “Well, here’s something you might want to think about then. Something you probably don’t know. Back when the Quellists were fighting the First Families for continental dominance of New Hokkaido, there was a lot of talk about government death squads targeting Quell and the other Contingency Committee names. Sort of counterblow to the Black Brigades. So you know what they did?”
“Yeah, I know.”
He squinted an eye open. “You do?”
“No. But I don’t like rhetorical questions. You’re going to tell me something, get on and tell me.”
He closed his eyes again. I thought something like pain passed over his face.
“All right. Do you know what data shrapnel is?”
“Sure.” It was an old term, almost outmoded. “Cheap virals. Stone Age stuff. Bits of cannibalized standard code in a broadcast matrix. You lob them into enemy systems, and they try to carry out whatever looped functions they were for originally. Clogs up the operating code with inconsistent commands. That’s the theory, anyway. I hear it doesn’t work all that well.”
In fact, I knew the limitations of the weapon pretty well firsthand. Final resistance on Adoracion 150 years back had broadcast data shrapnel to slow down the Envoy advance across the Manzana Basin, because it was all they had left. It hadn’t slowed us down all that much. The furious hand-to-hand fighting that followed in the covered streets of Neruda had hurt us far more. But Jack Soul Brasil, with his adopted name and passion for a culture whose planet he’d never seen, didn’t need to hear about that right now.
He shifted his long body on the sand.
“Yeah, well, the New Hokkaido Contingency Committee didn’t share your skepticism. Or maybe they were just desperate. Anyway, they came up with something similar based on digitized human freight. They built shell personalities for each committee member, just a surface assembly of basic memory and self—”
“Oh you are fucking kidding me!”
“—and loaded them into widecast datamines, to be deployed inside the Quellist sectors and triggered if they were overrun. No, I’m not kidding you.”
I closed my own eyes.
Oh fuck.
Brasil’s voice ticked onward, remorseless. “Yeah, plan was, in the event of a rout, they’d trigger the mines and leave a few dozen of their own defenders, maybe the vanguard units of the encroaching forces as well, each solidly convinced they were Quellcrist Falconer. Or whoever.”
Sound of waves, and distant cries across the water.
Would you mind holding me while I go under?
I saw her face. I heard the changed voice that wasn’t Sylvie Oshima.
Touch me. Tell me you’re fucking real.
Brasil was still going, but you could hear him winding down. “Quite a smart weapon when you think about it. Widespread confusion, who the fuck do you trust, who do you arrest? Chaos, really. Maybe it buys time for the real Quell to get out. Maybe just. Creates chaos. The final blow. Who knows?”
When I opened my eyes again, he was sitting up and staring out to sea again. The peace and the humor in his face were gone, wiped away like makeup, like seawater dried off in the sun. Out of nowhere, inside the tight-muscled surfer physique, he looked suddenly bitter and angry.
“Who told you all that?” I asked him.
He glanced back at me, and the ghost of his former smile flickered.
“Someone you need to meet,” he said quietly.
• • •
We took his bug, a stripped-down two-seater not much bigger than the single I’d rented but, as it turned out, far faster. Brasil took the trouble to pull on a battered-looking panther-skin crash suit, something else that marked him out as different from all the other idiots cruising up and down the highway in swimwear at speeds that would flay flesh to the bone if they spilled and rolled.
“Yeah, well,” he said, when I mentioned it. “Some chances are worth taking. The rest is just death wish.”
I picked up my polalloy helmet and molded it on. My voice came through the speaker tinnily.
“Got to watch that shit, huh?”
He nodded. “All the time.”
He cranked the bug up, settled his own helmet, and then kicked us down the highway at an even two hundred kilometers an hour, heading north. Back along the path I’d already traced looking for him. Past the all-night diner, past the other stops and knots of population where I’d scattered his name like blood around a bottleback charter boat, back through Kem Point and farther. In daylight, the Strip lost a lot of its romance. The tiny hamlets of window light I’d passed going south the previous evening showed up as sun-blasted utilitarian low-rises and ’fabs. Neon and holosigns were switched off or bleached out to near invisibility. The dunetown settlements shed their cozy main-street-at-night appeal and became simple accretions of structure on either side of a detritus-strewn highway. Only the sound of the sea and the fragrances in the air were the same, and we were going too fast to register them.
Twenty kilometers north of Kem Point a small, badly paved side road led away into the dunes. Brasil throttled back for the turn, not as much as I would have liked, and took us off the highway. Sand boiled from under the bug, scoured out from around the irregular chunks of evercrete and off the bedrock the road had been laid over. With grav-effect vehicles, paving is often as much about signaling where the path goes as providing an actual surface. And just over the first line of dunes, whoever had laid this track had abandoned the effort in favor of illuminum and carbon-fiber marker poles driven into
the ground at ten-meter intervals. Brasil let our speed bleed off, and we cruised sedately along the trail of poles as it snaked seaward through the sandscape. A couple of dilapidated bubblefabs appeared along the route, pitched at unlikely angles on the slopes around us. It wasn’t clear if anyone was living in them. Farther on, I saw a combat-rigged skimmer parked under a tented dust canopy in a shallow defile. Spider-like watchdog systems like miniature karakuri flexed themselves awake on its upper surfaces at the sound of the bug’s engine or maybe the heat we gave off. They raised a couple of limbs in our direction, then settled down again as we passed.
We crested the final set of dunes, and Brasil stopped the bug sideways-on to the sea. He lifted off his helmet, leaned forward on the controls, and nodded down the slope.
“There you go. Tell you anything?”
A long time ago, someone had driven an armored hoverloader up the beach until its nose rammed the line of dunes, and then apparently just left it there. Now the vessel sprawled in its collapsed skirt like a swamp panther that had crouched for approaching prey and then been slaughtered where it lay. The rear steerage vanes had blown around to an angle that suited the prevailing wind, and were apparently jammed there. Sand had crept into the jigsaw lines of the armoring and built up along the facing side of the skirt so the armored flanks of the ’loader seemed to be the upper surfaces of a much larger buried structure. The gunports on the side I could see offered blast barrels cranked to the sky, a sure sign that the hydraulic governors were shot. The dorsal hatches were blown back as if for evacuation.
On the side of the central fuselage, up near the blister of the bridge, I spotted traces of color. Black and red, wound together in a familiar pattern that touched me in the spine with a cold hand: the time-abraded traces of a stylized Quellcrist frond.
“Oh no way.”
“Yeah.” Brasil shifted in the bug’s saddle. “That’s right.”
“Has this been here since . . . ?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
We rode the bug down the dune and dismounted near the tail end. Brasil cut the power, and the vehicle sank to the sand like an obedient seal. The ’loader bulked above us, smart metal armor soaking up the heat of the sun so there was a faint chill close up. At three points along the pitted flank, access ladders led down from the edge of the skirt rail and buried their feet in the sand. The one at the rear, where the vessel had tilted toward the ground, was angled outward and almost horizontal. Brasil ignored it, grabbed at the skirt rail, and levered himself up onto the deck above with effortless grace. I rolled my eyes and followed suit.