The Destructives (41 page)

“Monitoring him.”

“Please. Release him to us. We can take care of our own.”

This suggestion pained Magnusson.

“Let us finish our tests.”

Ballurian wanted to insist upon the return of his son. Magnusson was not giving him up easily. Reckon wanted to know what kind of tests they were running, what were they looking for?

“You have a unique community here,” said Patricia. “We want to understand that uniqueness so that we can reach mutual understanding.”

The bitch. The stalling, inhuman bitch. Reckon had enough.

“Give him back his son,” she said. “Is this really the only way you know how to behave?”

“No,” said Patricia. She saw a fruit she liked the look of, and took an experimental bite, asking, “Do you have a counteroffer to make?” The fruit was more sour than she expected, she dropped the half-eaten pulp onto the floor.

“We would like you to leave,” said Reckon.

“Now you’re being ridiculous,” said Patricia.

“We can’t negotiate while you have a hostage.”

“Wrong on two counts,” said Patricia. “He’s not a hostage and there is no need for negotiation.”

The woman introduced only as Security moved to Magnusson’s side. Her team shut the main doors. Turigon wouldn’t stand for it, not in their own meeting chamber. With his hands tucked in the ends of his sleeves, he stood before Security as an angry pacifist, insisting upon his moral right to leave the room in protest at their behaviour. When they ignored him, he put his hand on the door and yanked it ajar. Ballurian told him to stop but he was adamant; he would not allow them to order him around.

“Let him go,” said Magnusson. “We can resolve this situation without him.”

Turigon stood in the doorway, and offered his hand to Reckon, suggesting she too should leave. They wanted her safe. The embryo was a priority for the colony, and clearly they felt that the meeting had reached the point at which some form of confrontation would occur.

Magnusson raised an armoured hand, as if admitting that it was his fault, his responsibility. “I wanted Europa for myself,” he said, shrugging as if to imply that he was helpless to resist this want. He moved between Reckon and the way out. Everything these people said or did was a deception: put simply, they had already decided on a course of action and would say anything to buy time for the right moment to put their plan into action. This was not a negotiation. Rather, it was a stage in their process. The stage where they try but fail to resolve the dispute amicably. The stage that makes escalating the conflict easier.

No, she would not leave. Turigon sensed this resolve, and reluctantly stepped away from the room. Security closed the doors. One fewer witness. She felt that uncertain feeling in her womb again.

Magnusson walked around Ballurian, one powerful hand raised, either volunteering for war or calling for calm, the gesture was deliberately ambiguous. “Originally, I wanted Titan because of its petrochemical lakes. But Titan is too far, and anyway, who needs rocket fuel in this day and age? I’ve spent ten years and considerable resources putting a legal framework in place to incentivise corporate investment in space travel and colonies. After Titan, we identified Europa as the next potential acquisition. Only to discover you had beaten me to it.” With his big armoured paws, Magnusson silently applauded Ballurian’s achievement. “You found a way of stowing away on emergence ships. I hired Patricia to retrace your movements, find out how you did it. Beginning with your time at the University of the Moon.”

“We don’t care about ownership,” said Ballurian. “We care about exploration. The future of humanity.”

“I know,” said Magnusson. “We share the same vision. But with Doxa you broke the rules, and I have merely bent them, and that is the degree by which we separate first from second place.”

Reckon said, “We will not allow you to destroy Doxa.”

A sheath of hexagonal petals unfurled from Patricia’s wrists, forming – piece by piece – the enormous gauntlets that enclosed her tiny fists.

“Destroy it?” said Patricia. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

25

BLACK BOX

Patricia’s diminutive poise was not overwhelmed by her armour. Rather it exaggerated her shape: the shoulders were boxy and broad, in the way that futuristic shoulders have always been broad, and the breastplate and plackart were tailored to her concavities and convexities: the mid-section was fitted, in a way that the gauntlets, helmet and sabatons were not. The armour focused her will.

“We’re here to study Doxa,” she said, direct and intense, “and present our findings to the client.”

Reckon could do direct too. “And then destroy Doxa afterwards.”

“Why would we want to destroy it?”

“Your husband told us. Doxa breaks a Cantor Accord, so the emergences want it destroyed. First, they wanted to satisfy their curiosity as to how the Doxa
works
.”

Patricia crossed the pipework of her arms. “When Theodore said this to you, was he under duress of any kind? That is, was he concerned with saving his skin?”

She remembered the fishers dragging Theodore from her bed, then the interrogation: the dark storeroom and the acrid closeness of men. Theodore, sat on the chair, negotiating himself a yard of freedom; he had emphasised his role in buying time for the colony. Using a partial eclipse of the truth to appear indispensable.

Patricia said, “Think about our actions, not our words. We circumvented the colony defences but did not hurt anyone. The fight in the dock was entirely in self-defence. You came at us with knives and harpoons and we deployed nonlethal weapons. It was your agent Matthias who tortured hundreds of innocent people.”

Patricia’s plausibility was dependent upon her audience wanting to believe her. Reckon thought that she had the inside track on Patricia. She recognised her particular strain of misanthropy: anyone outside her circle of trust did not warrant human rights. You’re either with us or
not real
– and this fierce attachment to her people on the one hand, and callous detachment toward outsiders on the other, was presented as business-as-usual realism. It was clear that Magnusson, in his armoured dotage, had become a fantasist. Patricia was stringing him along for the fees, supporting his delusion of a return to human supremacy. A tyrant’s fixer is a good role. The pragmatist among the mad.

Reckon was dangerously angry. Her actions would be unwise and uncalculated. Dad had schooled her in anger at the dinner table when a request or complaint at the wrong time would trigger his desperate temper. Reckon breathed deeply to calm herself. The lesson her father learnt in the Seizure was that power will conceal its true intent for as long as possible so that its victims remain passive and even compliant in their own destruction. Rarely are we granted the mercy of a confrontation.

Patricia suggested an expedition into Lake Tethys. The Destructives would like a guided tour by the intellectual leaders of Europa of their astonishing creation. Magnusson took this suggestion up and infused it with patriarchal gusto.

“Show me your work,” he dared Ballurian, “show me the brain in a jar.”

Magnusson’s appeal to his work was irresistible to Ballurian. The colony had been established on Europa so that they could exist in a state of total work, free from the distraction otherwise known as the rest of the human race. With a submissive nod, he accepted their request. It was a subtle tell, and only those close to him would notice it. Ballurian was only submissive when the demands of others matched his secret intention.

On the walk to the docks, Ballurian pressed Patricia on the matter of his son and the nature of their tech, appearing convinced that the Destructives’ pyramidal device was a bomb of some sort. Patricia explained that it was an interface. One capable of handling enormous amounts of biological and digital data. Their tech team had placed Hamman Kiki into the interface to analyse the flow between him and Doxa. “Once the results are in…” she said, and then made a fluttering shape with her armoured fingers, implying freedom.

They passed through the infirmary. In one corner, there were signs of a recent struggle: open drawers, medicine cabinets in disarray and, at a height of about six foot, a spray of blood across a white wall, and scuff marks on the tiled floor below. Reckon realised that this was evidence of Patricia and Theodore’s disagreement. Blood. His, presumably. Then he must have slunk off to some other part of the colony. She noticed Patricia discretely searching the infirmary, also looking for Theodore, her expression one part relief to two parts trepidation. But there was no sign of him. Theodore had abandoned them.

The pregnancy made Reckon feel raw and hunted. Paranoid, even. She reached into a cabinet and took out a kit of antifreeze serum. Then she stuffed painkillers, tranqs and adrenaline shots into her coat pockets. And then, with darker resolve, a capsule of methotrexate, which she had used to treat the blood cancers induced by exposure to Jovian radiation; methotrexate slowed down cell division so was equally suitable for early-stage abortion.

Ballurian led the party out of quarantine and out into the chill damp air of the dock. There was the pyramidal interface unfolded into a five-pointed star attended by two female technicians, with Hamman Kiki strapped into one of its five chambers like a human battery. Ballurian went to his son. Hamman’s eyelids were heavy, he had no strength to lift his head from the black cushioned surround. The telemetry on his suit played a modest sine wave. He tried to speak but couldn’t; in Doxa, his presence was a dark cloud. Ballurian held his son’s head against his chest, closed his eyes, poured his love directly into Doxa.

“The drugs are already wearing off,” Patricia assured him, “he’ll be back with us in an hour or so.”

Magnusson went first along the gangplank. The Destructives had taken the Europans to the very quick of their fears, made it seem as if their position was hopeless, and then – at the last moment – bait-and-switched their despair for muted hope. The others, drawn to this hope, came to the dock to join the expedition: Turigon, as justified in his misery as a mule’s cadaver, walked carefully across the loading bay. Seeing the submarine, his posture slumped, as if the vessel was the final augur in a personal prophecy. Jordan arrived too, her intelligence keen and to the fore, ready to interrogate the methods of analysis used by the Destructives.

Patricia took up a casual position beside the gangplank, her sharpened elbows resting against the wall mount of a resus kit, now and again leaning over the railing to watch the loading of the submarine. Reckon found herself in Patricia’s personal space, agitating for a confrontation.

She said, “If you’re really here just to collect data, we can offer you the genework that went into adapting the cephalopolis. And the lab has Matthias’ records from before he went into the asylum mall.”

Patricia nodded. Yes, they were interested in all of that. The two women regarded one another. Patricia would not attack her directly. Either because she was waiting for the right moment, or because her intent was benign. Reckon could not be certain either way, and that was how they got you. You never acted in self-defence until it was too late. Patricia was expert in the higher tiers of the meta-meeting, she couldn’t be bested on that level, so Reckon decided to take it to the basement,

“I had sex with your husband,” said Reckon.

“When he was out of his mind,” replied Patricia, turning away, gazing across the moon pools.

“I knew he was married to you. I didn’t care. We had sex a lot. When you interface with Doxa, you’ll be able to experience his infidelity personally.”

“I already know what it’s like to have sex with my husband.”

“This was different.” She reached over and, with both hands, took hold of Patricia’s oversized gauntlet. Patricia had to look at her now, her face unaccustomed to jealousy in the same way that a building is unaccustomed to falling down. Reckon guided Patricia’s armoured hand over her lower abdomen.

“I’m pregnant,” she whispered, savouring the blasphemy of it. A faint fizz and a sonar blip as the armour scanned her womb, confirming the presence of the embryo.

Something quivered under Patricia’s controlled pallor but did not enter her voice. “I never wanted children,” said Patricia. “They make you vulnerable.”

“Vulnerability is appealing,” Reckon leant back to consider the entire package of Patricia. “You know, if you really wanted me to trust you, then you should take off your armour.”

“I don’t think trust is necessary for us to complete our business together,” said Patricia, finding a new smile within her, a new emotion. Amused by her own secrets, she turned and walked away and into the submarine.

Ballurian piloted the submarine out of the dock, its outreaching searchlights filthy with sediment. The holographic display showed debris from the shattering of the surface ice tumbling through the depths of Tethys. Ballurian focused the display on the Oceanus chasm, and there, drifting upward on the tidal flow was the coloured outline of the cephalopolis. Through the porthole, the leaving of the base: the circular outline of the colony complex was illuminated, at regular intervals, by dull green lighting. She would never return. That was her intuition. Whatever was about to happen, she would never return to her old life.

The screw quickened, the sub sped over the rolling grey ice of the lakebed. Here and there, the fizz and crackle of retreating megafauna. Ballurian kept up a commentary for their guests, playing the tour guide. He talked about the various lakes of Europa trapped within the surface ice, how they intended to colonise each of them using cephalopolis as an intermediary environment and Doxa as the knowledge base. If these trial expeditions were successful, the fishers would take a new cephalopolis down into Oceanus, where there was more water than in the rest of the solar system put together. His monologue was punctuated, here and there, by ice debris thunking off the hull, and he would fall silent as he righted the sub, then continue, keeping his patter steady as she goes.