Glasshouse - Charles Stross [147]
“Oh,” I echo. “Oh, I see.” Being thumped on the head has left me sluggish and stupid. Janis is right, we don’t have to kill her. And suddenly I feel a whole lot better about punching Reeve and dumping her into a macro-scale nanostructure disassembler, for the same reason that punching yourself in the face never feels quite as bad as having someone else do it for you.
“I’m going to template from her, and then you’re going to follow her, and I’m going to take a delta from your current neural state vector and overlay it on Reeve. You’ll wake up back in her body, with both sets of memories, but you’re going to be the dominant set. Think that’ll work?”
There’s another muffled thump from inside the A-gate, then muffled retching noises—Janis has triggered the template program, paralyzing Reeve via her netlink, and the chamber is filling with ablative digitizer foam. “It had better,” I say.
“I’m worried Fiore may suspect what’s going on. The thing with Mick could blow it completely if he puts two and two together.”
I sigh heavily. “Okay, I’ll go back to being Reeve. I suppose that makes sense.”
“You agree?” She looks haggard in the dim light from the ceiling bulbs. “Good, then it’s not entirely stupid. What then . . . ?”
“Then we sit down and figure out how to nail down the lid on this mess. Once I know what she knows.”
“Right.” Her lips quirk in a faint smile. “Your direct, no-nonsense approach is always like a breath of fresh air.”
“Once a tank, always a tank,” I remind her.
“Right,” she echoes, and for a moment I can see a shadow of her former self. That sends a pang through my chest.
“The sooner I’m myself again, the better.”
We sit in silence for long minutes while the gate chugs to itself, then finally the console chimes, and there’s a click as the door unlatches. I walk over and swing it open: as usual, the chamber is bare and dry. I glance over and see that she’s watching me.
“Ready?” she asks.
“See you on the other side, Sanni,” I say as I close the door.
That’s all.
SECURITY Cell Blue used to be part of the counterespionage division of the Linebarger Cats. It was supposedly disbanded, all memory traces erased, at the end of the censorship wars. I know this is not the case because I’m a member. We didn’t disband, we went underground—because our mission wasn’t over.
This is a risky business. Our job is to do unpleasant things to ruthless people. Covering our tracks costs money—lots of it, and it isn’t always fungible across polity frontiers these days. Local militias and governments have reinvented exchange rates, currency hedges, and a whole host of other archaic practices. Some polities are relatively open, while others have fallen into warlordism. Some place great stock on authentication and uniqueness tracking, while others don’t care who you think you are as long as you pay your oxygen tax. (The former make great homes; the latter make great refuges.) As a consequence of the postwar fragmentation, we end up moving around a lot, shuffling our appearances and sometimes our memories, forking spares and merging deltas. At first we live off the capital freed up by the Cats’ liquidation; later we supplement it by setting up a variety of business fronts. (If you’ve ever heard of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, or Cordwainer Heavy Industries, that’s us.) Operationally, we work in loosely coupled cells. I’m one of the heavy hitters, my background in combat ops meshing neatly with my intelligence experience.
About fifty megs after the official end of hostilities, I receive a summons to the Polity of the Jade Sunrise. It’s a strictly tech-limiting polity, and I’m in ortho drag, my cover being a walkabout sword-fighting instructor. I’ve got access to enough gray-market military wetware that I can walk the walk as well as slice the floating hair, and my second-level cover is as a demilitarized fugitive from summary justice somewhere that isn’t tech-limited—which sets me up for the Odessa Introduction if I see a target of opportunity and need to run a Spanish Prisoner scam on them.