At 10:16 the next morning, Katia Neiland walked into the private hospital ward. Sandy looked across in surprise, and lowered her paperback. The President walked unescorted across the sun-splashed floor, smiling at her.
‘Hi,’ she said. Stopped by the bedside, a hand upon the visitor’s chair.
‘Hello.’ Weary eyed and fuzzy-headed, her voice remained at best a soft murmur. An eyebrow quirked in mild surprise, looking past the President toward the doorway. Then refocused with gradual, deliberate calm. ‘Where’s your entourage?’
‘Leashed in the corridor, sniffing nurses’ backsides.’ Smiling in apparent good humour. ‘You two make a nice couple.’
Sandy glanced across at Vanessa, who lay alongside on the broad hospital bed. Sleeping peacefully, brown curls strewn about a face that seemed to Sandy perhaps incongruously angelic, now that the mischievous energy in her eyes was safely hidden behind gentle, closed eyelids. Dressed in the customary, post-armour tracksuit that had followed her shower, lying comfortably above the covers. Only a small weight on the mattress.
‘She was on a thirty-hour rotation including the Berndt Operation,’ Sandy replied, gazing at the sleeping Lieutenant. ‘Maybe three hours’ sleep in between. Then she had me to attend to all last night. She got to sleep about six hours ago, I reckon she’ll wake up in another eight, if she’s lucky. It takes it out of you.’
‘And what about you? Why aren’t you sleeping?’
Sandy shrugged faintly. ‘I hate sleeping under drugs — they’re still in my system. I wake up feeling even more tired than when I started. I woke up two hours ago and thought I’d read instead.’
‘Hmm. What is that?’ The President stepped forward and lifted the book in her hand, studying the cover. ‘Jagdish Singh. Is he any good?’
‘Typical Indian drama, lots of marriages, scandals, gratuitous high-fashion and excuses for fancy costumes … it’s fun, it passes the time.’
Neiland settled back into the visitor’s chair with a sigh. Looked about at the broad windows that stretched around the large room, letting in the sunlight. Outside, it was a lovely day. Endless blue sky beyond the reaching towers. The room was well furnished — a deluxe suite. Security required it. And their guest deserved it.
‘So,’ she said, looking back at Sandy. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Doctors briefed you, I suppose?’ Sandy murmured. Neiland nodded. ‘Well this is where I get grateful I’m not a straight human — I’d be dead five times over. I just feel numb all over. Can’t move, can’t eat properly, breathing hurts …’ She shrugged. ‘… I’ll be okay.’
‘Christ, after stopping an automatic burst point-blank, that’s something to be thankful for.’
‘There was a car door in the way,’ Sandy replied, quiet and hoarse. ‘Slowed them a bit, flattened them, made them tumble. Uneven impacts, they didn’t penetrate as much.’ Neiland was staring. Sandy managed a faint smile, remembering the line they’d always told straights who asked. ‘My stomach’s rated at fifty percent tougher than a vest. Most of me is.’
Neiland reached and took her hand. Held it in both of her own, feeling between fingers and thumb. Probing. Sandy watched, blue eyes gone sombrely curious. Flexed her fingers slightly, a faint ripple of movement beneath Neiland’s probing examination. Neiland looked at her, mild amazement in her eyes.
‘That’s pretty zeeked,’ she said. Borrowing from her son’s vocabulary, Sandy guessed with faint amusement. ‘Feels completely human. You’ve even got the same veins …’ probing with a curious forefinger, tracing a line.
‘Cosmetic,’ Sandy told her.
‘Even so.’ Turned over her palm, as if reading the lines. Felt at the wrist. Frowned as she searched. ‘No pulse though.’
‘Lower blood pressure,’ Sandy murmured. ‘Much thicker consistency, much more efficient. Keeps up sensory energy mainly. Feedback nerves, temperature, organs. Muscles don’t need it, that’s mechanical. So I only need about twenty percent the blood that you do.’ Neiland looked fascinated. ‘Don’t ask me any more. Biology isn’t my strong point.’
‘Biology,’ Neiland murmured, continuing her examination. ‘That’s what it is really, isn’t it? Artificial biology. Nothing mechanical about it.’
Sandy made a fist and clenched it, hard. Neiland pulled at it with her fingers. Grabbed with both hands and made an effort, biting her lip. And gave up with a whistled breath. The fist moved not one millimetre.
‘It is mechanical,’ Sandy told her quietly. ‘So’s yours. A hand’s just an organic tool. Yours grew from DNA. Mine’s synthetic. But it’s still just a hand. It just depends on your perspective.’
Neiland gazed at her, green eyes locked, hands gentle upon the closed fist.
‘Does that bother you?’ Sombrely. ‘Having been made? All this …’ Fingers probed down her arm, ran up to her shoulder and rested there. ‘… all put together in pieces. Made in hundreds of hightech labs. Toiled over by workers, designers. Engineers.’ Sandy blinked, softly.
‘Does it bother you,’ she replied, ‘having once been a small collection of cells in a bloody mass attached to the side of a womb?’
‘No.’ Smiling. ‘It’s marvellous. The wonder of birth and growth. But factories, money and politics …’ Her gaze was penetrating. ‘It doesn’t bother you?’
‘How doesn’t bother me,’ Sandy replied. ‘Why does. Why bothers me a lot.’
Neiland thought about it. Leaned forward, elbows on knees, and rested her chin on her hands, Sandy’s hand still lightly grasped in her fingers.
‘I’m sorry,’ she sighed. ‘It’s hardly the perfect time to start getting curious.’
Sandy gave a faint shake of her head.
‘No, it probably is the perfect time.’ She rolled her head against the pillow. Looked at Vanessa, head on a separate pillow alongside her own. Still sound asleep. Sandy doubted anything short of a live weapons drill would wake her.
‘I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit,’ she said, gazing at Vanessa’s peaceful face. ‘It’s something that needs thinking about.’
‘Any conclusions?’
‘No.’ Softly. ‘Just that I need to think about it some more. Soon.’
A silence, Sandy watching Vanessa, Neiland watching them both. There was something very touching in Vanessa’s slumber, here at her side. Sandy remembered that Vanessa had once spoken of reflexive fears, human reactions to the theoretical presence of threat. And yet here she was, sleeping soundly alongside, unafraid and unworried. Wanting only to be there because her friend Sandy required it, and there was no second bed in the ward, and Sandy, conscious at the time, had invited her to. Vanessa had climbed up alongside, put her head down, and was asleep within seconds. No qualms, no second thoughts, not even after witnessing first-hand what Sandy was capable of. Not even after having fired the stun pellet that dropped her. She had lain down with full knowledge of what she had been sleeping beside, yet had shown not the slightest trepidation, reasoned or otherwise.
It was a nice feeling. For someone to know full well who and what she was and accept her anyway. Consider her a friend. Someone who would protect rather than harm. Which she would, if it came to that, no question. In fact, she thought with tired, reluctant amusement, Vanessa could probably not have found a safer bed to sleep on in all of Tanusha.
‘So,’ she said tiredly, withdrawing her hand from Neiland’s curious grip and putting both hands behind her head with a slow, wincing effort, propping her head. ‘What’s it been like at your end?’
Neiland exhaled, shoulders slumping theatrically. Sandy smiled.
‘A mess,’ the President said, leaning wearily back in the chair. ‘But that was inevitable. There’s a major Senate inquiry being launched, full access, public disclosure … just a big, major flap.’ Ran a hand absently over her dark-red hair, tugged at the rear knot. ‘The Federal Committee’s going to get here in another ten days … they’re not going to know what hit them. A very sour reception from both sides, I’m feeling. Of course, it remains to be seen just how much of this whole FIA operation they knew about. We’ll be demanding a Federal inquiry on their own level with full Callayan representation, but I don’t know if anyone’s really expecting much. The FIA has too many Federal supporters, too many border worlds are still hawkish on the League … you know that story better than I could tell it.’
Sandy raised a conceding eyebrow. Flexed stiff, painful shoulders, wincing at the stabs of pain up her back and through her stomach. Tight beneath hard-packed bandages.
‘You realise,’ the President added, ‘that the media now know you exist?’
Sandy sighed. Nodded painfully. ‘Yeah. I heard. Figured it would be kind of difficult to cover up at this point.’ Silence, thinking about that for a moment. ‘Suppose it was inevitable. Pity. I kind of valued my anonymity.’
‘Ah,’ Neiland waved a dismissive hand, ‘it’s not so bad, you’ll get used to it.’ Sandy gave her a very flat look. ‘Well okay, it’ll have its moments. But we’ve got an action plan in the works. They can’t reveal your name or face because that’s covered by the security legislation, and we’ve got feelers out in the underground that suggest they’re pretty much on your side. The whole underground crowd are generally League-sympathetic anyway — they hate the FIA. They seem to think you’re some kind of white witch or something. So you’ll have your supporters. Things shouldn’t get too far out of control.’ She paused. ‘And things are going to get kind of busy in the next few months. People will have plenty of other things to worry about.’
Sandy didn’t ask. She already knew enough. The anti-Federation protests. The succession moves. The anti-League backlash. Anti-Federation backlash. The biotech radicals and religious conservatives panicking. The next few months would give everyone a lot to think about. Unfortunately, all of those issues seemed to lead directly back to herself, at some point or other.
She exhaled hard, a tight pulling at her midriff, head pillowed on her hands as she stared at the ceiling. The clear, bright sunlight through the windows made a mockery of such murky complexities. She longed for simplicity again. Just a brief respite from having to double-check every option for traps, pitfalls and dead-ends. To go where she pleased and not care for consequences. To forget.
‘Another thing I wanted to ask you,’ Neiland said after a long, silent moment. Her voice was quiet. And Sandy felt her spirits drop through the floor as she sensed what was coming.
‘Mahud.’ One single, sombre word, and the blackness hit her hard in the gut. The sunny day turned to brooding dark. ‘The body’s under the tightest security possible, meaning information control as much as anything. There are options here that I want to clear with you now, while I have the chance.’
Neiland’s tone was professional and steady, but there was sadness in her eyes. Sandy stared blankly at the ceiling.
‘The first thing,’ she continued in that quiet, sombre tone, ‘is that when the Senate investigation gets into full swing in a few days they will find out about Mahud. There are powers by which they could gain access to his body. Once that happens, it’s out of my hands. There could then be forensic investigations and examinations, maybe even some study research … it’s not allowed, technically, but there are loopholes and arguments for special cases. They’ve already found plenty with the Parliament strike team. They’re not nearly the prize that Mahud would be, though.
‘Now I’ve talked to Guderjaal, and he’s prepared to grant you family custody, as effective next-of-kin. Technically it ought to wait until the inquiry finds out, but it’s not explicitly spelled out, and that’s too bad for them. It also falls under the Federal anti-GI restrictions, which most politicians will find difficult to argue against without getting into hot water with the public, conservative radicals or otherwise. In the meantime, I’m informed that there is a smelter we can hire for government use on short notice that could double as a crematorium. I’m told that’s the way it was done in the League, with a recovered body. It can handle a GI’s body, and give you his ashes afterward. I know it’s not my place to decide for you, but obviously a burial would not work since GI remains mostly do not decay. What do you think?’
Strangely, Sandy did not feel any urge for tears. There was just an empty hollowness, the sense of something just missing. Like she was back on that operating table, under the FIA’s knives, losing limbs. A horrible feeling. But she was too drained for grief. Too empty. And maybe, she couldn’t help but think, too good at coping with this kind of thing.
No. She hadn’t coped well at all last night. Had tried, she recalled dimly, to eat a bullet. She felt no such urge now. It solved nothing, and her waking, sane logic rebelled at the prospect. She knew now, with a grim, fatalistic certainty, that things would go on. She would go on. She had once believed Mahud dead, only to discover otherwise. To have lost him again was agony of a kind that was almost unbearable. But she knew herself too well to believe herself defeated by events. To know herself crushed.
For she could recall, with great, terrible effort, that she had been through worse. It did not seem possible, and for long moments at a time her brain refused to accept that it could be true. But it had been worse, back then, when she’d been told that her entire team was dead. And she had survived and recovered, somewhat, from that devastation. This blow was less, but cumulative. Yet she would survive this one too.
She was too good at the big picture. It had always been her tactical strong point — her ability to see the broader canvas. To focus beyond the moment, to see the future and the past that anchored the present in place. In mission planning it had enabled her to link together cause and effect, to predict an opponent’s movements, and the reasons behind them. In life it enabled her to see further than the immediate trauma, see the possibilities that lay beyond. To see that there was always something worth living for … for someone prepared to change her life.
She turned her head and looked again at Vanessa, sleeping like an angel beside her. Pulled a hand from behind her head, and brushed some loose, curling hair away from Vanessa’s face. Her sleeping expression registered no response, oblivious to all but her sleeping dreams. Sandy feared they might be bad dreams, but hoped sincerely otherwise.
‘I think,’ she murmured, ‘that you should do that. He wouldn’t want me to give those bastards the satisfaction.’ Neiland nodded solemnly.
‘I’ll give the instruction.’ Pause. ‘A number of CSA agents have requested to be present at the ceremony.’ Sandy turned and stared in astonishment.
‘Ceremony?’
‘They took the FIA’s actions very personally,’ Neiland continued. ‘Some of them nearly dropped through lack of sleep trying to track them down. The effort was enormous. A Chief Investigator Khurana in particular, Shan tells me. He and his people consider Mahud a hero. He has demanded to be present at the ceremony. I think he’ll have a lot of company.’
Sandy blinked, swallowing hard against the growing ache in her throat.
‘I don’t know if a ceremony…’
‘Of course there’ll be a bloody ceremony,’ Neiland cut her off with gentle firmness. ‘You need it, they want it, and he bloody well deserves it. Don’t you think?’
Sandy nodded, unable to argue with that. Not trusting herself to speak.
‘Good.’ Looking at her with a tired, lopsided smile. ‘I’m sorry to dump it all on you so soon. It just needed to be done.’ Sandy nodded, wordlessly. Her head was spinning.
‘And after that,’ Neiland said, ‘when you’ve recovered, there’s something that Shan wants you to do for him. For everyone.’
‘What?’ she murmured hoarsely.
‘Take a vacation.’ Sandy blinked. And looked at the President, questioningly. A vacation. She couldn’t recall ever having been on a vacation. Unless you counted going AWOL. What did one do on a vacation? Was there a procedure?
‘Where would I go?’ she asked.
The sunlight through the canopy was bright at four thousand meters. Hands rested on sun-warmed controls, a gentle manual, feeling the rise and fall of air currents against the flyer’s control surfaces. A buzz of vibration through the molded grips, through the comfortable leather of her seat, a muffled whine of thrusters, broad fan jets, carving the air.
As her eyes filtered the glaring light, Sandy gazed out the enclosing width of canopy at the broad, open country of Callay that lay stretched below. Here the forests had given way to broad, open valleys, patches of bare granite amid the flowing grass and scrub. Rivers flowed, many tongued and linking, a myriad of sun-glistening causeways. The flyer rocked slightly, air rising in thermals from the rock below. A pressure on the controls and she corrected, a shifting movement as the flyer responded, riding the air that she caressed with her hands.
She was one hundred and forty kilometres south-west of Tanusha and it was a lovely day. Further into the distance was broken and scattered cloud, snow white in the sunlight. There was a song on the radio — a Tanushan station via satellite relay, a rock band, guitars and vocals, something both sad and happy at the same time, pleasant harmony and rising emotion. It had been running around in her head for the last few days, and it was good to be hearing it now. She hummed a soft accompaniment and breathed the deep, long breaths of open space and long distances yet to travel.
She wore casual shorts and a T-shirt scrawled with Urdu script — Vanessa’s alma mater, she had gathered, and a common enough sight on the streets of Tanusha. Her bare legs were warm in the mid-morning sun. A gentle breeze of airconditioning kept the temperature cool. She had a backpack with clothes and necessities on the back seat, a decent quantity of credit on her CSA card and a surfboard that Singh had lent to her at Vanessa’s insistence, with a promise that she’d learn to use it. Vanessa had been pleased at the idea, had said that with her coordination she’d be an expert grommet in no time at all. Vanessa, Sandy knew, was trying to find her a hobby. She appreciated the thought.
Well Ricey, she thought to herself past the rising chorus from the radio, the tourist brochures say there’s a hundred thousand kilometres of untouched coastline on Callay, not even counting the islands. Maybe some of those waves have my name on them.
The flyer rocked again, displays describing a thermal, upward flowing air in curious, rotating pillars. Another shift of hands, enjoying the sensation, the aircraft loose and free upon the shifting currents of air, responding to her touch. It had been a while since she had last used her pilot’s qualifications. One of many military skills, it had been, tape-taught long ago but rarely used, faded with time and lack of practice. But the hands remembered. They held a steady course, while the eyes scanned the displays and her interface made occasional brief, scanning contact with the flyer CPU, acquiring a feel, a broad sensation of data. Of flying. It felt good, as the sun on her bare limbs felt good, as the vista of rumpled, rocky, folded terrain was good, amid a sea of grass and scrub, and a running gleam of sunlight across the many forks of rivers.
It was good. And it was surreal.
Herself, in a civilian flyer, packed bags like some adventuring Tanushan backpacker escaping from work, or family, or school, to the adventure of the ninety-five percent of the planet where humans were rare and civilisation rarer. It was, she had gathered in recent days, a significant part of Tanushan folklore. Among SWAT and CSA personnel of her acquaintance, stories abounded of ‘going bush’ or ‘walkabout’.
For some, it meant luxury resorts, sunsets by the swimming pool and karaoke barbecues. For others, it was cruises and boats. Vanessa, of course, was a mad-keen scuba diver, who swore that a week among reef fish, coral shelves and five-metre, curiously intelligent dragonrays was the ultimate solution for urban tension. Hiraki was a keen mountaineer, for whom happiness could be found amid the soaring heights of the Great Tarikashi Shelf, or the equatorial Wilmott Ranges. And the big, burly Bjornssen, she had been surprised to learn, was a dedicated nature enthusiast, who had once spent a month’s accumulated leave in the southern Argasuto tundra with his girlfriend, following the hundred thousand-fold migration of the twelik, a kind of native deer. Which must have been quite a sight.
And she herself … she would go wherever the winds and thermals would take her. It was a vague thought, partly formed amid the abstracts of sun and landscape and the soaring sensation of flight. And it was most unlike herself. Vague thoughts. Unfocused. Wandering, wherever the winds should blow. She only knew that it was good. And necessary.
The flyer was Ibrahim’s idea. A rental. Expensive, she knew, but Ibrahim had dismissed it with an absent wave of a hand. ‘And remember,’ he had told her, ‘the destination is nothing without the journey.’
‘Islamic?’ she had asked.
‘Shanish,’ he had replied. And was gone before she recognised the humour.
The song came to an end. Another began, mellow acoustic. She adjusted the volume, hand gently levering the throttle, searching for a steadier airflow in the mild turbulence. Civilian flyer. Recreational. Cruising at a little over five hundred kilometres per hour, she wasn’t about to set any speed records. But it was reliable and easy to fly. And fun, that too. She had the coastal town of Ito fixed firmly in the navcomp, and the user-friendly pilot displays showed her the way. Ito, she had been told, had nice beaches, good diving, some forested mountains nearby and a population of barely twenty thousand, most of whom did little more than service the tourist trade. She was certain that Ito would be nice. She was certain that the places beyond Ito would be nice also. She had the flyer on twelve-day rental. She could come and go as she pleased, and the planet did not seem like such a large place after all.
And she felt … curious. Soaring in flight, her consciousness somehow free, beyond the moment, the shift of control grips upon yielding air, the crystal sunlight, the vast horizon. Perhaps it was significant, she pondered, this detachment. Perhaps some curious quirk of bio-artificial psychology. Perhaps post-traumatic. Perhaps a rejection of sensory data, a reflex response to recent overload. Most probably it was. All of those things, and more besides.
And maybe … maybe she was just tired. Tired of the ponderings. Tired of the questions. Tired of the endless contradictions that made up her existence. And just sick and tired to death that it had to mean anything. She felt, perhaps, the most overwhelming and complete urge just to let it be.
She was. She would always be.
I am.
The civilian flyer cruised on, a small, significant speck in a vast expanse of sunlit sky. It faded toward a new horizon, bright and clear in the gleaming sun. Time flowed. Life continued.
The city of Tanusha bided its time, and awaited her return.
