"Use of Weapons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Banks Iain)

Four

"The fact remains," Skaffen-Amtiskaw insisted, "that the last time we went through this rigmarole, Zakalwe fucked up. They froze his ass in that Winter Palace."

"All right," Sma said. "But it wasn't like him. Okay, so one time he gets it wrong… we don't know why. So maybe now he's had time to get over it, he'll actually want a chance to show he can still do the business. Maybe he can't wait for us to find him."

"Good grief," sighed the drone. "Wishful thinking from Sma the Cynical. Maybe you're starting to lose your touch too."

"Oh shut up."

She watched the planet swing towards them on the module screen.

Twenty-nine days had passed on the Xenophobe.

As an ice breaker, the fancy-dress party had been a crushing success. Sma had woken up in a cushion-filled alcove of the rec area, birth-naked and in a tangle of assorted equally nude limbs and torsos. She had extricated one arm carefully from under the voluptuous sleeping form of Jetart Hrine, stood shakily, and gazed round the softly breathing bodies, appraising the men in particular, and then — treading very carefully, nearly over-balancing several times on the plump cushions, her muscles all complaining and trembly — tip-toed her way between the slumbering crew to the welcome solidity of the red-wood floor. The rest of the area had already been tidied. The ship must have sorted out everybody's clothes, for they lay in neat piles on a couple of large tables, just outside the alcove.

Sma massaged her slightly tingling genitals, grimacing. Bending over, they looked quite pink and raw; things looked slippery, and she decided she needed a bath.

The drone met her at the entrance to the corridor. Its red glowing field looked at least partially like a comment. "Good night's sleep?" it inquired. "Don't start that again."

The drone floated at her shoulder as she headed for the elevator.

"You've made friends with the crew, then."

She nodded. "Very good friends with all of them, by the feel of it. Where's the ship's pool?"

"Floor above the hangar," the machine said, following her into the elevator.

"Record anything exciting last night?" Sma asked, leaning back against the elevator wall as they dropped.

"Sma," exclaimed the drone. "I would not be so ungallant!"

"Hmm." She raised one eyebrow. The elevator stopped, door opening. "What memories, though," the drone said, breathily. "Your appetite and stamina are a credit to your species. I think."

Sma dived into the smaller whirlpool, and, on surfacing, spat a jet of water at the machine, which dodged and backed into the elevator. "I'll just leave you to it, then. Judging from last night, even an innocent offensive-model drone isn't safe from you once you get the bit between your teeth. So to speak."

Sma splashed at it. "Get out of here, you prurient pisspot."

"And sweet-talking won't work ei…" the drone said, as the elevator door closed.

She would not have been surprised if the atmosphere in the ship had been a little embarrassed for a day or two thereafter, but the crew seemed quite cool about it all, and she decided that, basically, they were good sports. Happily, the fad for having colds passed quickly. She settled down to studying Voerenhutz, trying to guess where in the interlinked civilisations they were heading for Zakalwe might be… and enjoying herself, though — in the case of the latter activity — not on anything like the same scale or with quite the same frenetic abandon as she obviously had on her first night aboard.

Ten days out, the Just Testing sent news that Gainly had been delivered of twins; mother and pups doing well. Sma prepared a signal that her stand-in was to give the hralz a big kiss, from her, then hesitated, realising that the machine that was impersonating her would doubtless already have done so. She felt bad, and in the end just sent a formal acknowledgement.

She kept up on recent developments in Voerenhutz; the latest Contact forecasts were getting gloomier all the time. The brush-fire conflicts on a dozen planets each threatened to ignite a full-scale war, and — while getting a direct answer was proving difficult — she formed the impression that even if they found and convinced Zakalwe almost as soon as they landed, and hauled his ass out on the Xenophobe with the ship pushing its design limits, the chances of getting him to Voerenhutz in time to make any difference were at best fifty-fifty.

"Holy shit," the drone said one day, as she sat in her cabin, reviewing cautiously optimistic reports on the peace conference back home (for so she had started to think of it, she admitted to herself).

"What?" She turned to the machine.

It looked at her. "They just changed the course schedule for the What Are The Civilian Applications?"

Sma waited.

"That's a Continent class GSV," the drone said. "Sub-class Prompt, one of the limiteds."

"You said it was a General; now it's a Limited; make up your mind."

"No, I mean it's a limited edition; the go-faster model; even nippier than this beast, once it gets going," the drone said. It floated closer to her, fields set a weird mixture of olive and purple, which she seemed to remember indicated Awe. She'd certainly never seen that expression on Skaffen-Amtiskaw before. "It's heading for Crastalier," it told her.

"For us? For Zakalwe?" she frowned.

"Nobody'll say, but it looks like it to me. A whole General Systems Vehicle, just for us. Wow!"

"Wow," Sma mimicked sourly, and pressed the screen for the view forward of the Xenophobe, still charging through the star systems for Crastalier. In their false representation on the screen, the stars ahead blazed blue-white, and — at the right magnification — the overall structure of the Open Cluster was easily visible.

She shook her head, went back to the peace conference reports. "Zakalwe, you asshole," she muttered to herself, "you'd better fucking show up soon."

Five days later, and still five days away, the General Contact Unit Very Little Gravitas Indeed signalled from the depths of the Open Cluster Crastalier that it thought it had picked up Zakalwe's trail.

The blue-white globe filled the screen; the module dipped its nose, plunging into the atmosphere.

"I just get the feeling this is going to be a complete debacle," the drone said.

"Yes," Sma said, "but you're not in charge."

"I'm serious," the machine told her. "Zakalwe's lost it. He doesn't want to be found, he won't be talked round, and even if by some miracle he can be, he can't do the same thing with Beychae. The man's washed up."

Sma had a sudden, strange flash of memory then, back to the horizon-wide beach, and the man who'd sat at her side for a while, watching the wide ocean roll its waves up and down the glistening slope of sand.

She shook herself out of it. "He's still together enough to junk a knife missile," she told the machine, watching the hazy, cloud-shadowed ocean scroll beneath the dropping module. They were approaching the cloud tops.

"That was for him. For us, it'll be another Winter Palace job; I can feel it."

She shook her head, apparently hypnotised by the view of cloud and curving ocean. "I don't know what happened there. He got into that siege and just wouldn't break out. We warned him; we told him, in the end, but he just wouldn't… couldn't do it. I don't know what happened to him, I really don't; he just wasn't himself."

"Well, he lost his head on Fohls. Maybe he lost more than that. Perhaps he lost it all on Fohls. Maybe we didn't quite save him in time."

"We got to him in time," Sma said, remembering Fohls as well now, as they plunged into a bulging cloud-top and the screen went grey. She didn't bother to adjust the wavelength, apparently content to look at the glowing, featureless interior of the cumulus.

"It was still traumatic," the drone said.

"I'm sure, but…" she shrugged. The view of ocean and clouds burst clear onto the screen again, and the module angled steeper, powering down towards the waves. The sea flashed up towards them; Sma turned the screen off. She looked bashfully at Skaffen-Amtiskaw. "I never like watching that," she confessed. The drone said nothing. Inside the module, all was peace and quiet. After a moment, she asked, "We in yet?"

"Doing our submarine impression," the drone said crisply. "Landfall in fifteen minutes."

She turned the screen back on, got it to adjust for a sonic display, and watched the rolling sea floor speed by beneath. The module was manoeuvring hard, swinging and diving and zooming all the time, avoiding sea creatures as it followed the slowly rising slope of continental shelf towards the land. The view on the screen was disconcerting; she switched it off again, turned to the drone.

"He'll be all right, and he'll come with us; we still know where that woman is."

"Livueta the Contemptuous?" sneered the drone. "Short shrift she gave him last time. She'd have blown his head off if I hadn't been there. Why the hell should Zakalwe want to meet her again?"

"I don't know," Sma frowned. "He won't say, and Contact hasn't got round to doing the full procedure on the place we think he came from. I think it must involve something from his past… something he did, once, before we ever heard of him. I don't know. I think he loves her, or did, and still thinks he does… or just wants…"

"What? Wants what? Go on; you tell me."

"Forgiveness?"

"Sma, given all the things Zakalwe's done, just since we've known him, they'd have to invent a personal deity for him alone, to even start forgiving him."

Sma turned away to look at the blank screen again. She shook her head and said quietly, "It doesn't work that way, Skaffen-Amtiskaw."

Or any other way, the drone thought to itself, but didn't say anything.

The module surfaced in a deserted dock in the middle of the city, amongst the flotsam and jetsam. It roughed the texture of its outermost fields, so that the oily scum on the surface of the water stuck to it.

Sma watched its top hatch close, and stepped off the back of the drone, onto the pitted concrete of the dock. The module was ninety-per cent submerged; it looked like some flat-bottomed boat turned turtle. She straightened the rather vulgar culottes which were, regrettably, the height of fashion here just now, and looked up and around at the crumbling empty warehouses which all but enclosed the quiet dock. The city — she was oddly gratified to find — grumbled beyond.

"What was that you were saying about not looking in cities?" Skaffen-Amtiskaw inquired.

"Don't be crass," she said, then clapped her hands and rubbed them. Looking down at the drone, she grinned. "Anyway: time to start thinking like a suitcase, old chum. Make with a handle."

"I hope you realise I find this every bit as demeaning as you think I must," Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, with quiet dignity, then extended a soligram handle from one side, and flipped over. Sma gripped the handle and strained at it.

"An empty suitcase, asshole," she grunted.

"Oh, pardon me, I'm sure," Skaffen-Amtiskaw muttered, and went light.

Sma opened a wallet full of money displaced only hours earlier from a city-centre bank by the good ship Xenophobe, and paid the cab driver. She watched a line of troop carriers thunder past, heading down the boulevard, then sat on a bench which formed part of a stone wall bordering a narrow strip of trees and grass, and looked out over the broad sidewalk and the boulevard beyond, to the large and impressive stone building on the far side. She place the drone beside her. Traffic roared past; people hurried to and fro in front of her.

At least, she thought, they're fairly Standard. She had never liked being altered to impersonate the natives. Anyway; they had inter-system travel here, and were fairly used to seeing people who looked different, even alien on occasion. As usual, of course, she was very tall in comparison, but she could live with a few stares.

"He's still in there?" she said quietly, looking at the armed guards outside the Foreign Ministry.

"Discussing some sort of weird trust set-up with the top brass," the drone whispered. "Want to eavesdrop?"

"Hmm. No."

They had a bug in the appropriate conference chamber; literally a fly on the wall.

"Wa!" the drone yelped. "I don't believe this man!"

Sma glanced at the drone, despite herself. She frowned. "What's he said?"

"Not that!" the drone gasped. "The Very Little Gravitas Indeed just worked out what the maniac's been up to here."

The GCU was still in orbit, providing back-up for the Xenophobe; its Contact procedures and equipment had provided and were providing most of the information about the place; its bug was monitoring the conference chamber. Meanwhile, it was scanning computers and information banks over the entire planet.

"Well?" Sma said, watching another troop carrier rumble past on the boulevard.

"The man's insane. Power mad!" the drone muttered, seemingly to itself. "Forget Voerenhutz; we have to get him out of here for the sake of these people."

Sma elbowed the suitcase-drone. " What, dammit?"

"Okay; here, Zakalwe's a goddamn magnate, right? Mega-powerful; interests everywhere; initial stake what he brought with him from the place he junked the knife missile; the loot we gave him last time, plus profits. And what is the core of his business empire, here? Genetechnology."

Sma thought for a moment. "Oh-oh," she said, sitting back on the bench, crossing her arms.

"Whatever you're imagining, it's worse. Sma; there are five rather elderly autocrats on this planet, in competing hegemonies. They are all getting healthier. They are all getting, in fact, younger. That oughtn't to be possible for another twenty, thirty years."

Sma said nothing. There was a funny feeling in her belly.

"Zakalwe's corporation," the drone said quickly, "is receiving crazy money from each of those five people. It was on the take from a sixth geezer, but he died about one-twenty days ago; assassinated. The Ethnarch Kerian. He controlled the other half of this continent. It's his demise that has led to all this military activity. Also, with the exception of the Ethnarch Kerian, these suddenly rejuvenated autocrats were showing signs of becoming uncharacteristically benign, from about the time they started getting so suspiciously frisky."

Sma closed her eyes for a moment, opened them. "Is it working?" she said, through a dry mouth.

"Like hell; they're all under threat from coups; their own military, as a rule. Worse than that, Kerian's death lit a slow fuse. This whole place is going super-critical! And we are talking tootsies on the event horizon; these meatbrained loonies have thermonukes. He's crazy!" the drone suddenly screeched. Sma hissed to quiet it, even though she knew the drone would be sound-fielding its words so that only she could hear. The drone spluttered on: "He must have cracked the gene-coding in his own cells; the steady-state retro-ageing that we gave him; he's been selling it! For money and favours, trying to get these monomaniac dictators to behave like nice people. Sma! He's trying to set up his own contact section! And he's fucking it! Completely!"

She whacked the machine with one fist. "Calm down, dammit."

"Sma," the drone said, voice almost languid, "I am calm. I'm just trying to communicate to you the enormity of the planetary cock-up Zakalwe has managed to concoct here. The Very Little Gravitas Indeed has blown a fuse; even as we talk, Contact Minds in an ever-expanding sphere centred right here are clearing their intellectual decks and trying to work out what the hell to do to tidy this stunningly ghastly mess. If that GSV hadn't been on its way here anyway, they'd have diverted it because of this. An asteroid belt-sized pile of shit is about to hit a fan exactly the size of this planet, thanks to Zakalwe's ludicrous good-guy schemes, and Contact is going to have to try and field all of it." It hesitated. "Yeah; I just got the word." It sounded relieved. "You have a day to haul Zakalwe's loop-eyed ass out of here, otherwise we snatch him; emergency displace, no holds barred."

Sma took a very deep breath. "Apart from that… everything all right?"

"This, Ms Sma, is no time for levity," the drone said, soberly. Then; "Shit!"

"What now?"

"Meeting's over, but Zakalwe the Insane isn't taking his car; he's heading for the elevator down to the tube system. Destination… naval base. There's a submarine waiting for him."

Sma stood. "Submarine, eh?" She smoothed the culottes. "Back to the docks, agree?"

"Agreed."

She hefted the drone, started walking, looking for a cab. "I've asked the Very Little Gravitas Indeed to fake a radio message," Skaffen-Amtiskaw told her. "A cab should pull up here momentarily."

"And they say there's never one around when you need one."

"You're worrying me, Sma. You're taking all this far too calmly."

"Oh, I'll panic later." Sma took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Could that be the cab?"

"I believe it is."

"What's "To the docks"?"

The drone told her, and she said it. The cab sped off through the largely military traffic.

Six hours later they were still following the submarine, as it whined and whirred and gurgled its way through the layers of ocean, heading for the equatorial sea.

"Sixty klicks an hour," fumed the drone. "Sixty klicks an hour!"

"To them it's fast; don't be so unsympathetic to your fellow machines." Sma watched the screen as the vessel a kilometre in front of them burrowed its way through the ocean. The abyssal plain was kilometres below.

"It isn't one of us, Sma," the drone said wearily. "It's just a submarine; the smartest thing inside it is the human captain. I rest my case."

"Any idea where it's heading yet?"

"No. The captain's orders are to take Zakalwe wherever he wants to go, and after giving him this general heading, Zakalwe's kept quiet. There's a whole heap of islands and atolls he could be making for, or — several days travel away at this crawl — thousands of kilometres of coastline, on another continent."

"Check out the islands, and that coastline. There must be a reason he's heading this way."

"It's being checked out!" the drone snapped.

Sma looked at it. Skaffen-Amtiskaw flashed a delicate shade of purple, intimating contrition. "Sma; this… man… totally blew it the last time; we're five or six million down on that last job, all because he wouldn't break out of the Winter Palace and balance things out. I could show you scenes of the terror there that would blanch your hair. Now he's come very close indeed to instigating a global catastrophe here. Since the guy suffered what happened to him on Fohls — since he started trying to be a good guy in his own right — he's been a disaster. If we do get him, and can get him to Voerenhutz, I just worry what sort of chaos he'll engender there. The man's bad news. Never mind outing Beychae; offing Zakalwe would be doing everybody a favour."

Sma looked into the centre of the drone's sensory band. "One;" she said, "don't talk about human lives as though they're just collateral." She breathed deeply. "Two; remember the massacre, in the courtyard of that inn?" she asked calmly. "The guys through the walls, and your knife missile let off the leash?"

"One; sorry to have offended your mammalian sensibilities. Two; Sma, will you ever let me forget it?"

"Remember what I said would happen if you ever tried anything like that again?"

"Sma," the drone said tiredly, "if you are seriously trying to imply that I might kill Zakalwe, all I can say is; don't be ridiculous."

"Just remember." She watched the slowly scrolling screen. "We have our orders."

"Agreed on courses of action, Sma. We don't have orders, remember?"

Sma nodded. "We have our agreed on courses of action. We lift Mr Zakalwe and take him to Voerenhutz. If at any stage you disagree, you can always butt out. I'll be given another offensive drone."

Skaffen-Amtiskaw was silent for a second, then said, "Sma, that is probably the most hurtful thing you have ever said to me — which is saying a lot — but I'll ignore it, I think, because we are both under a lot of stress at the moment. Let my actions speak. As you say; we lift the planetfucker and drop him in Voerenhutz. Though, if this voyage goes on too much longer, it'll all be taken out of our hands — or fields, as the case may be — and Zakalwe will wake up on Xenophobe or the GCU, wondering what happened. All we can do is wait and see."

The drone paused then. "Looks like it could be those equatorial islands we're heading for," it told her. "Zakalwe owns half of them."

Sma nodded silently, watching the distant submarine creep through the ocean. She scratched at her lower abdomen after a while, and turned to the drone. "You sure you didn't record anything from that, umm, sort of orgy, first night on the Xenophobe?

"Positive."

She frowned back at the screen. "Huh. Pity."

The submarine spent nine hours underwater, then surfaced near an atoll; an inflatable went ashore. Sma and the drone watched the single figure walk up the golden, sunlit beach towards a complex of low buildings; an exclusive hotel for the ruling class of the country he'd left.

"What's Zakalwe doing?" Sma said, after he'd been ashore for ten minutes or so. The submarine had dived again as soon as it recovered its inflatable, and taken a course back to the port it had departed from.

"He's saying goodbye to a girl," sighed the drone.

"Is that it?"

"That would appear to be the only thing to draw him here."

"Shit! Couldn't he have taken a plane?"

"Hmm. No; no airstrip, but anyway, this is a fairly sensitive demilitarised zone; no unexpected flights of any sort allowed, and the next seaplane isn't for a couple of days. The sub was actually the fastest way of…"

The drone fell silent.

"Skaffen-Amtiskaw?" Sma said.

"Well," the drone said slowly, "the doxy just smashed a lot of ornaments and a couple of pieces of very valuable furniture, and then ran off and buried herself in her bed, weeping… but apart from that, Zakalwe just sat down in the middle of the lounge with a large drink and said (and I quote), "Okay; if that's you, Sma, come and talk to me.""

Sma looked at the view on the screen. It showed the small atoll, the central island lying green and squashed looking between the vibrant blues and greens of ocean and sky.

"You know," she said, "I think I would like to kill Zakalwe."

"There's a queue. Surface?"

"Surface. Let's go see the asshole."