Chapters (56)
- PROLOGUE
- PART 1
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- PART 2
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- PART 3
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- PART 4
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- PART 5
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- EPILOGUE
“Fucking Mecsek,” Murakami said irritably, nodding at the prone figure in the grav bed. “If it was my call, there’s no way local government would have had access to this stuff at all, let alone a mandate to license it out to a bunch of drugged-up bounty-hunter dysfunctionals. We could have had an Envoy specialist team deployed to clean up New Hok, and none of this would ever have happened.”
“Yeah, but it would have cost too much, remember?”
He nodded glumly. “Yeah. Same fucking reason the Protectorate leased the stuff out to everybody in the first place. Percentage return on investment. Everything’s about fucking money. No one wants to make history any more, they just want to make a pile.”
“Thought that was what you wanted,” Virginia Vidaura said faintly. “Everyone scrabbling for cash. Oligarchical caretakers. Piss-easy control system. Now you’re going to fucking complain about it?”
He shot her a weary sideways look and shook his head. Liebeck and Tomaselli wandered off to share a seahemp spliff until Vlad/Mallory showed up with Impaler. Downtime. The grav sled bobbed unattended, a metre from me. Rain fell softly on the transparent plastic covering and trickled down the curve. The wind had dropped to a hesitant breeze and the blasterfire from the far side of the farm had long ago fallen silent. I stood in a crystalline moment of quiet and stared down at Sylvie Oshima’s frozen eyes. Whispering scraps of intuition scratched around at the barriers of my conscious understanding, seeking entry.
“What’s this about making history, Tod?” I asked tonelessly. “What’s going on with deCom?”
He turned to me and there was a look on his face I’d never seen before.
He smiled uncertainly. It made him look very young.
“What’s going on? Like I said before, what’s going on is that it works. They’re getting results back at Latimer, Tak. Contact with the Martian AIs. Datasystem compatibility, for the first time in nearly six hundred years of trying. Their machines are talking to ours, and it’s this system that bridged the gap. We’ve cracked the interface.”
Cold-taloned claws walked briefly up my spine. I remembered Latimer and Sanction IV, and some of the things I’d seen and done there. I think I’d always known it would be pivotal. I just never believed it would come back to claim me.
“Keeping it kind of quiet, aren’t they,” I said mildly.