Nemesis (39 page)

‘Then suddenly, out of the blue, we were all split up and shipped off to the colonies. My parents went with me, but by then we barely had anything in common. The fact that they kept moving us about made it worse. They filtered me into ordinary roboteer schools for a while, but that sucked, too. I was already too different. In the end, they set up the bullshit Omega Academy, which was basically a cover for the programme they’d originally started. Except now it was supposed to be training that any roboteer could apply for. Nobody got in but us
special
kids, of course. Around that time, my parents moved away to New Panama and I didn’t see them at all anymore. Will made sure of that.’

‘Jesus,’ said Zoe. ‘Talk about isolating.’

Mark looked down at his hands. ‘To call the whole experience isolating would be putting it mildly,’ he said. ‘But we had each other again, which was something. And, to a certain extent, we had Will and Rachel. Mostly Rachel, because Will was always off trying to save the world. Then everything began to fall apart. Uncle Gustav – that’s the Great Prophet Ulanu, Father of Transcendism, to the rest of you – got shot. Will started to lose it, and consequently Rachel spent a lot more time in space, pushing the Frontier.

‘She had more insight than most, that woman. She saw that the New Frontier was creating problems, so she put her energy into trying to find new star systems out beyond Galatea on the human shell. Of course, nobody else was interested in human space any more because there was so much easy money to be made from looting the Fecund. Then her ship flew into that bank of shit I believe they’re now calling the Curvon Depleted Zone. Basically, it’s the edge of our fucking Petri dish, so far as I can tell.’ He balled his hands into fists. ‘Anyway, no one knew what had happened, but the Fleet wasn’t doing shit to rescue her. So I did something.’

‘You took a ship,’ said Zoe.

‘Yeah, I took a ship. Which was a terrible idea. But you have to realise I grew up with all the rules being bent around me. We weren’t supposed to even fucking exist. Everything I did was a special case. Half the time I was treated like a prince, and the other half like some kind of slackwit robot. So I did what we all saw Will doing, which was to
push
to get what he wanted.’

‘And your ship got trapped, too,’ said Venetia.

‘Yep. And all the poor suckers I dragged along with me. It took us about a month to escape under conventional velocity. By that time we were going a tenth of a conventional light and it took forever to sort out our reference frame.’

Mark sighed. Just recalling the experiences exhausted him.

‘So then there was a tribunal, which was when all kinds of little gems of information started to come out. Like the fact that Will had
paid
my parents to leave, to get them out of the way.’

‘Ouch,’ said Zoe.

‘And the fact that unlike everyone else on the programme, I also had mods from Rachel, though it was never on the books. So technically, my dorm-mother was at least as much my mother as my
actual
mother. Which was distressing, because she was by now technically considered dead.’

‘That’s … horrible,’ said Zoe, sounding a little awed.

‘There was a nice little identity crisis in there, too, because Rachel was stuffed full of Galatean genetic mods. She was from one of those
born-to-fly
families with more genetic tweaks than a slab of vat-pork. So I’d spent my childhood believing I was some kind of roboteer representative of Earth, while in fact I was at least half-Galatean. There’s nothing quite like discovering that all the things you thought made you special were put there by someone else.’

Zoe shook her head. ‘I don’t get it. Why all the secrets?’

‘Supposedly?’ said Mark. ‘Will said they’d acted that way because of assassination threats. He saw sending my folks away as
rescuing
my parents for me. Convenient, huh? And at no time was I consulted about any of that or treated like an adult in any way. The Fleet regarded me as fucking property throughout, right up until they started trying to take away my interface. That’s when I realised I’d been bred to be a puppet. You all got to choose your careers. I was a starship captain from
birth
. That’s why I don’t spend too much time being proud of it.

‘My life since then has been about two things. Trying to add value on my own terms, which is why I went off to fly lifters. And reconnecting with my roots to find out whether there’s anything else to me aside from the shit the genetic engineers stuffed in there, which is why I went to Earth. The Fleet hated it, of course. They all thought I was going to start running Flags for some bullshit Truist cult. So far as they were concerned, I was Fleet-owned technology. So, unsurprisingly, when a chance to put all that behind me came along, I signed up.’

He drew a deep breath. ‘
Voilà
, your captain,’ he said, and rested his head on the table, spent.

‘Holy crap!’ said Zoe. ‘I thought you were going to tell us you were bullied at school or something.’

‘Nope,’ said Mark. ‘A kid tried once. I accidentally broke his spine. He had to spend a month in a gel-tank having his vertebrae reprinted.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I get it. The attitude problem, in context, seems … I don’t know … inevitable?’

‘Thanks,’ said Mark, his forehead still on the table. ‘I guess.’

‘I should apologise,’ said Zoe. ‘I had it tough growing up, too, but not to that extent. Anyway, to me you seemed like a kind of stuck-up-victim sort, so I had you pegged as self-indulgent. My bad. I hope you can forgive me for getting it so wrong.’

Mark felt a surge of warmth toward her, but didn’t speak for fear of ruining it.

‘What happened to you, then?’ said Venetia. ‘Mark’s shared his story. The Fleet could probably have us all locked up now for what we just heard. So let’s hear yours.’

‘It’s nothing like that.’

‘I’d be shocked if it was, dear,’ said Venetia. ‘Come on, out with it.’

Mark raised his head to look at Zoe, still slumped against the wall. She stared at him for a few moments, as if trying to figure something out. Then her eyes drifted off to the middle distance.

‘I was a nerd,’ she said. ‘No bad thing in itself, except that I grew up on New Angeles. My parents were part of the occupying Earther force during the war, and then applied for citizenship afterwards when their sect refused to pay for their flight home. They were just in the Science Division, but we still got treated like dirt. So we had zero money, everybody hated us and we had no access to the surgical tech everyone else did. Which is why I don’t look like an Angeleno. I can tell you, it’s not easy growing up the ugly girl in a world full of perfect Amazonian blondes.’

Mark frowned at her in confusion. Zoe was very far from ugly.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I had one advantage – I was smart. I worked hard in the shitty school we had access to and used all the IPSO-Online educational tools I could reach. I was good enough that when I hit sixteen I qualified for a Vartian Scholarship and got off that awful rock. Anyway, that took me to the Institute on Galatea, where I had a different problem. Suddenly I wasn’t the smartest kid in the class any more. Because everyone there had mods.’

Mark was surprised again. He’d assumed she had mods. He’d never known anyone think so quickly without them.

‘So I pulled the one trick I had over all of them from my childhood, which was to work my ass off. I graduated top of my class in Xenophysics and have been pushing for missions ever since.’

Mark found her story slightly embarrassing. In some ways, she’d had it harder than him. He was born with an embarrassment of genetic riches he didn’t know what to do with. She’d had none but still managed to work her way to the top. Furthermore, she didn’t complain about it.

‘That’s amazing,’ he said. ‘I’m impressed.’

Zoe gave him the warmest smile he’d ever seen grace her features.

‘Your turn,’ said Zoe, pointing at Venetia.

‘Oh no!’ said Venetia, holding up her hands. ‘I’m the psychologist, remember? I get to ask the questions, not answer them.’

‘Come on,’ said Mark, amused. ‘We’re done with secrets. Spit it out.’

‘Well, okay, but I’m nothing like you two,’ she said, folding her arms. ‘I grew up on Esalen. I was young when the war happened, so I got to see our pathetic neo-hippy government try to remain neutral in the face of the Truist occupation. In any case, I was always a bit of an introvert and a misanthrope. After the war, I decided Esalen wasn’t a great fit for me, so I moved away and changed my name. Fortunately, I was good enough in school to be able to apply for a scholarship like you did, Zoe. One that came with a starship berth.’

‘You changed your name?’ said Zoe.

Venetia nodded. ‘Venetia Sharp is something I made up that I thought sounded more like the real me. My original name was Sunbeam Moonflower.’

Mark let out a single ragged laugh.

‘You don’t strike me as a Sunbeam,’ said Zoe.

‘No,’ said Venetia. ‘As I said, I was raised neo-hippy and still share a lot of those values, but I see the limitations, too. And besides, I was always more interested in non-human minds than human ones. I also like getting things wrong so that I can do better next time. On Esalen, even now, people are obsessed with staying positive, despite the neuroscientific evidence that things aren’t so simple. You’d think, after the things the Earthers did …’

She let that sentence hang, her brow tightening briefly with the sour memory.

Mark missed the next thing she said because a ping came in from Ash. He leapt to his feet and then tried to restrain his excitement in case the room still had operational cameras.

‘Where are you?’ he yelled into his sensorium. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Still in orbit,’ said Ash. ‘I’m going to get you out.’

Mark gritted his teeth to stop himself from grinning. ‘Do we have surveillance in here?’ he said.

‘Mark, what’s happening?’ asked Zoe in the background.

‘No. I deactivated it,’ said Ash. ‘There’s no one else on your level. I have pretty good coverage of their system at this point.’

Mark let out a whoop. ‘We’re getting off this rock,’ he told the others. They jumped up.

‘I’m damned glad you called,’ Mark said to Ash. ‘I’d given up on you.’

‘I almost did, too,’ said Ash. ‘But you have to promise me something.’

‘Sure – you name it,’ said Mark.

‘What I have to share with you is grim. I’ve made some big mistakes, got involved with a secret group trying to head off a war. And Sam … He’s not being reasonable any more. I want you to promise me that if I pull you out of there, you’ll cover my ass when we get home, because otherwise they’re going to have me shot.’

‘The conspirators?’

‘No, Mark. The Fleet. This thing is treason. Are you up for this? Because I’ll be counting on you. You’ll be all I’ve got.’

‘Okay,’ said Mark slowly. ‘You have a deal, I guess. The stakes are high enough.’

‘All right,’ said Ash. ‘In that case, you’d better sit down because I’m sending you a memory dump and you’re not going to like it.’

Mark gingerly returned to his seat.

Zoe jumped up and grabbed his arm. ‘What’s the issue?’ she said expectantly. ‘When are we leaving?’

‘One minute,’ he said. ‘Incoming data.’ He swapped his focus back to Ash. ‘Go ahead.’

A link appeared in Mark’s sensorium. He knocked it back. Awful knowledge blossomed in his head. His jaw fell open.

‘Ugh,’ he said as understanding dawned.

He felt a surge of anger towards Ash. The man had sold Mark out in court to bargain his way into the League, then been complicit in the entire plot that followed. But that emotion thinned to nothing next to the terrible realisation of what was coming. Death wasn’t an outside chance for Carter. It was a certainty. Just as it was for his home. His face distorted from the pressure of the knowledge coursing through his head.

‘No,’ he croaked.

The next thing he knew, Venetia and Zoe were standing over him, holding his hands and shouting.

‘Are you okay?’ said Venetia.

Zoe was more direct. ‘Please tell us what the fuck is going on!’

‘We’re leaving,’ said Mark, rising uncertainly to his feet. His heart pounded from the weight of imposed panic that had come with the download. ‘Ash, can you get us out of this room?’

The door slid open.

‘You need to move to a lower level using the emergency stairs,’ said Ash. ‘If a pod comes up to this floor, they’ll be on to us.’

‘How far down? We’re two hundred stories up.’

‘Just past the occupied ones,’ said Ash. ‘If these plans are right, that’s the eleventh below you. If you get down that far I can pick you up on a maintenance routing. But we don’t have long. The
Gulliver
will be over your horizon again in a minute, which means I’ll have to bounce via relay. I’m going to keep comms to a minimum in case they spot us. Just go. I’ll pick you up.’

Mark turned to the others. ‘Okay, let’s get out of here,’ he said. ‘We’re taking the stairs.’

13.4: ANN

Rather than heading for her station suite, Ann made her way to the nearest bank of private study-spaces and picked a cubicle. The walls sprang into life as she stepped inside, bringing up her personal displays copied over from the
Chiyome
. A touchboard shelf slid out to meet her hands.

‘Give me war modelling,’ she told the room.

Senator Voss might not want to talk about backup options, but that didn’t stop Ann from looking for one. Maybe the senator would be easier to persuade with a better way to handle the Nem threat sitting in front of her.

She should have guessed that Brinsen would try to undermine her the moment they docked. The jackbooted little rat must have been desperate to keep his own record clean. No matter that she’d got it right from the outset. They should have listened to Will more from the start. They should have trusted him. She fought back a throat-clotting surge of regret and got to work.

The room brought up a system map laying out all her work on simulations of the impending sect/colony crisis. Ann knew the map well – it represented years of obsessive effort on her part. She’d crafted her own political SAPs, work most people would have left to a machine-intelligence specialist, and combed through years of political data to build her model constraints. The evolutionary coding engine that created fresh software implementations for every run had been off-the-shelf, admittedly, but almost everything else she’d coded herself.