Windswept (33 page)

“That had nothing to do with your pai’s ability to record,” said Soni. “It just set up the travel tags. Which you disobeyed.”

“Because of the important shit, remember?” I said, blinking back into my buffer. Nothing there. “Great, even
I
can’t see anything.”

“Oh, that’s probably my fault,” said Banks, looking up from the porthole. “Your pai hasn’t been able to record anything for a bit.”

I blinked, trying to keep from punching him. “Since when?”

“Two days ago. When we first met. On the boat.”

“So, that means everything I’ve seen...”

Banks swallowed and flicked his fingers in the air. “Poof.”

“Why in hell did you do that?”

“Well, it wouldn’t do me much good as a covert operative if you could go and show people my face, would it?” said Banks. “It’s standard procedure for us.”

I took a deep breath, then looked at Soni. “Well, it seems that everything I’ve said will sound pretty insane now.”

Soni nodded. “Lucky for you, Banks was able to corroborate a lot of what you said.”

“Thank God.”

“But you’re still under arrest for Saarien’s murder.”

“But he’s not dead!” I yelled. “The three of us saw him! He yelled at me! Twice!”

“Maybe,” said Soni, “but I still have a body that matches his DNA tags. So, unless you can produce the real, live Saarien–”

“He’s in Sou’s Reach! In his giant, secret refinery! Along with Jordan Blanton and–”

“–and now you’re starting to sound like a crazy person,” she said. “But we will deal with that, after we deal with this little issue of the Ghosts running around and killing people.”

“Only Vytai Bloombeck,” said Banks. “He was the only one we were permitted to deal with.”

“–which puts
you
on the hook for his murder,” said Soni. “And for screwing with Padma’s pai.”

“And yours, too,” said Banks. “Actually, just about everyone I’ve been in contact with. Sorry, it’s part of my own pai’s protocols. Special Ghosty stuff.”

Soni held up the pad. “This, too?”

Banks nodded.

“Right,” said Soni, tossing the pad aside and pulling a stack of paper and a pen from under the table. “Looks like we’ll have to start at the beginning. Name.”

“Come on, Soni, can’t we just sail to Sou’s Reach, bust Saarien’s little cane deal, and be done with it?”

Soni put down the pen and gave me her hardest Cop Stare. “When you were leading the strike at the brush factory, did I tell you how to do your job?”

“You might have said a few words.”

“I seem to remember telling you to stick to your guns, because what you were doing was important,” said Soni. “I respected your work, both as a professional and as someone who knew how important it was to stand up to WalWa or anyone else who tried to screw with the Union. You had your role to play, your rules to follow. And now I have mine, and that means dealing with a stack of dead bodies in the wake of an incursion by agents of our former employer. Don’t you think that’s important?”

I sighed. “Yes, Captain Baghram.”

“Goddamn right,” said Soni, snatching the pen and pointing it at Banks. “Now. Name.”

“Banks.”

“Full name.”

“That’s it,” he said. “I only have the one name. Easier that way.”

“Fine,” said Soni, scratching on the paper. She got a few letters written before the pen gave out. “Jesus Christ, you’d think someone would check if there were enough ink on this boat.” She stood up and pointed the pen at both of us. “Stay here.”

“Like we have anywhere to go,” I said.

“Didn’t stop you before,” she said, and left the room. The door clacked shut behind her.

Banks and I looked at each other for a moment. “Any chance of you fixing my pai?” I said.

“It’ll fix itself after I leave,” he said. “Part of the protocol. Makes people think their pais are screwing up themselves. It’s a bit easier to pull off on Union-controlled planets because of all the firmware patches.”

“We reburn every pai’s firmware when someone signs up.”

“I don’t have to get one, do I?” said Jilly.

“We don’t have the capability to make them,” I said. “You’re safe. Unless there’s someone here who
does
know how to fix nanometer-wide circuits. Now that I’ve seen what Bloombeck could do, I’m wondering how many other people there are like him here.”

“Not many,” said Banks. “The Big Three really does keep a close eye on the people who Breach. Some of them just fell through the cracks.”

“Bloombeck’s been here for twenty years.”

“Sometimes the cracks are
really
big.”

“So that’s why you killed him?” I said. “Just to clean up someone’s mistake?”

“He’s dead?” said Jilly. “The fat guy?”

“Thanks to him,” I said, nodding at Banks. Jilly gave him a once-over, then scooted to the other side of the room.

“Look,” said Banks, “Mimi shot him because he was dangerous to you, to me, and to everyone in Occupied Space. He took a garden variety crop pest and turned it into something that could wipe out every last bit of cane on this planet. Imagine what that would do if it got offworld? We’d be thrown back to the Stone Age inside of a decade.”

“I think that’s exaggerating a bit.”

“Is it?” said Banks. “The annual harvest from Santee Anchorage, in a bad year, is enough to power four other worlds. A
bad
year. When things are humming, you can power a
dozen
worlds. Start multiplying that effect by hundreds of other colonies, start thinking about the
trillions
of people who rely on industrial cane for fuel, for plastics, for everything that makes our civilization run. Even our star drives need a jump start from a cane-derived fuel cell. If the black stripe spread, all of that would be gone.”

“Hooray for our corporate saviors,” I said.

“You think you guys can come up with an antifungal treatment or put some kind of terminator genes in Bloombeck’s strain?” said Banks. “We can. It’ll stop here.”

“But you still killed him,” I said. “You acted on behalf of WalWa. You could have dimed him to Soni, you could have exposed him on the Public, you could have done all sorts of things, but you killed him. He was in the way of some Big Three business, and we can’t have that.”

“You know, up until now, I thought you
hated
him.”

“I did,” I said. “But he was still Union, and he didn’t deserve what happened to him. Same with Jordan, and Tonggow, and–”

“And Saarien?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“What were we talking about?”

“You and your buddies killing Union people.”

“But Jordan and
her
buddies are alive,” said Banks. “And I had
nothing
to do with them.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Tonggow’s gone, so the Co-Op will take over her distillery and probably do something to screw it up, which is just as well since it seems like every stick of cane on this planet is going to turn to goo or distill into skunked rum. But that’s OK, because I’m going to get tossed in prison or my brain’s gonna go
pop
anyway. Fuck. Fuck!” I kicked the wall and slammed the porthole shut. It just bounced off its frame and swung back into place. I leaned back against the bulkhead and stared up at the ceiling.

“You know,” I said, “the thing of it is that I
still
didn’t get you guys signed up. You’re all going to bounce away, and I didn’t seal the deal.”

“Well, I still want to Breach.”

“Terrific,” I said. “That’ll go over really well. ‘Hi, guys, this is Banks. He used to be a Ghost, but now he’s totally on our side. Also, he had nothing to do with that bunch of corpses we had over the past few days.’”

“Well, I didn’t,” said Banks. “None of us did. Look, Padma, I know you’re angry, but, just for one moment, please look at my situation from a management position.”

“Oh, that is nowhere near funny.”

“It wasn’t meant to be,” said Banks. “Listen, our gig was to get in and out as fast as possible with the minimum amount of fuss. That’s why our pais futz with everyone else’s: by the time we’ve left and people realize something’s wrong, they’ll rewind their buffers and just see static. They’ll only have their memories, which are prone to mistakes, especially if we ourselves are unmemorable.”

“Executing someone in his home and then tearing up a stack of houses is going to be hard to forget.”

“And that’s because this whole thing has gone
wrong
,” said Banks. “We should have gotten in and out, and no one would have known or cared that we were here. Instead, there’s a string of bodies, a gun battle, airships–”

“And don’t forget the crane chase.”

“Exactly!” said Banks. “None of this crap was supposed to happen. None of it is what I signed up for all those years ago.” He snorted.

“Why did you?” said Jilly.

“Would you believe it was because I was too good at my job?” he said. “I’d get assigned to a case, and I’d start digging under all the layers of legal weirdness because I wanted to see where it all went. It was great for a while, and then I got assigned to this class-action lawsuit.”

“What’s that?” asked Jilly.

“A bunch of people working together to sue some asshole,” I said.

Banks gave me a look. “It was on a shared world, one split between WalWa and MacDonald Heavy. Some colonists sued WalWa for not following through on contractual relief efforts during a ricewheat blight. I started studying the whole thing, reading through transcripts and field interviews, even digging up documentaries about the place, and then I saw that none of it fit. The place was run by respected agronomists and botanists, and they had a record of careful land management for generations.

“And then I realized that there was a hole in the data. It kept moving around: bits of garbled interviews, seconds of fuzzed footage. And I traced the whole thing back to the colony’s head of security, who talked about a group of engineers who’d shown up the season before to do some surveying, and then had vanished. And then I go through
another
round of research, because this whole thing fascinated and pissed me off, and I look through chemical assays and water samples, and realize these engineers had been tampering with the water supply of a LiaoCon colony on the other side of the mountain range, and that they had introduced contaminants into the water table that caused the blight.

“So, I bring the whole thing up to my bosses, and, next thing I know, someone tosses a bag over my head, hauls me away to a nasty little office, and they make me an offer: sign up as a Ghost, or disappear.” He shook his head. “That was fifteen years ago. I think.”

“You think?”

“All that time awake, going from one gig to the next, it’s all...” He waved his hand, like he was trying to stir the words out of his brain. “You know how you need to dream? Try not being able to sleep.”

“Because of your pai?”

He nodded. “We can access other people’s pais, but when we sleep, we lose control over what we’re processing. It’s hard enough to see through another person’s eyes, but when it’s a dozen, or a hundred, or a whole city full of people... and then we can’t even control what we do.” He swallowed.

“What else happens?” I said. “From staying awake?”

“You get paranoid as hell, because you start to see the way everyone is looking at you, and you second guess if you’re staying undercover or not,” he said. “Most of us are good at filtering it out, but sometimes something can throw you off. If you don’t keep a tamp on your emotions, you can lose focus, start to get really worked up.”

I thought back to Nariel. “Would, say, confronting an unpleasant memory do that?”

“It would have to be pretty unpleasant.”

“Getting fired and demoted and bounced out of corporate life?”

Banks furrowed his brows. “Are you talking about Ellie?”

“I’m talking about
Nariel
,” I said, and I told him the whole sordid tale.

By the time I was finished, Banks had his face in his hands. “Well, that certainly explains a lot.”

“Like?”

He took a deep breath. “Well, it’s quite likely that my teammate has gone and, um, freelanced.”

“That’s an interesting way to put it,” I said. “How much ‘freelancing’ are we talking about?”

“Maybe the woman who owns the distillery.”

“What about Saarien?”

“Well, he’s not exactly dead.”

“But would she be working with him?” I said.

“Maybe,” said Banks. “It would certainly fit with the pattern.”

“What pattern?”

“Every one of those people who’s dead or supposed to be dead had seen us,” said Banks.

“So have a few hundred other people,” I said. “Is Nariel going to start executing whole crowds next?”

“No, not unless
you
need those people to get ahead.”

My blood ran cold. “Banks, when you say that you can access other pais, does that include the ones lodged in yours and your fellow Ghosts’ eyes?”

Banks, to his credit, looked me in the eye as he nodded. “Everything I’ve seen and heard, everyone else on the team has, too.”

“So, when you and I were talking to Wash, Nariel knew about how my deal with him depending on getting Jordan and her crew to help him out?”

He nodded.

“And when I was talking with Tonggow earlier, she saw that?”

He nodded, a little quicker this time.

“And, when you and I were in that warehouse, and I told you about how I came to be here... she knew that?”

He nodded.

“Sweet Working Christ, she did it,” I said. “Nariel killed Tonggow, what, just to get back at me?”

“I think so.”

“But this also means that
you
knew everything she’d seen, right?”

“Up to a point,” said Banks. “I think she’s had something done to her pai so I can’t see
everything
.”

“But you knew it was her shooting at us in Steelcase and in the burn room.”

“Yeah, but I couldn’t break cover.”

“Why?” I said. “You were so worried about the mission?”

“No, I was worried that if I let on that I knew, you wouldn’t help me Breach,” he said. “You remember me talking about the two crazy women I worked for? They’re here.”

“What, Nariel and Mimi?”