Expatria: The Box Set (34 page)

CHAPTER 9

Katya Tatin felt good. She had just finished Maxing and now she was drifting freely inside one of the hermetically sealed units the menials had constructed within Station Yellow.

It was one of those perfect moments, everything seemed to slide together without join, the universe was contained within her soul. Katya was a part of GenGen, GenGen a part of Katya. There was a unity in her heart.

She floated.

Eventually, guilt at her idleness prompted her towards action. She stretched, yawned, scratched. Idleness meant she had nothing with which to employ herself. 'Unemployment is sin,' she muttered, and stretched again. She had been feeling twitchy, impatient, and Sugratski had told her to rest; he'd said she would need it—she might not have the opportunity to receive the Max for some time. 'A spiritual shield,' he had said, 'to keep the barbarians at bay.' The thought of the atheist masses had been enough to convince her.

She hated times like this, when her thoughts were shifted out of focus, her mind free to wander through the clear corridors of memory. Now she gave herself a templar twitch, a surge of adrenalin that made her want to
do
.

She nudged herself away from one wall of the unit and moved over to the stash where she had left her clothes. She rolled the skinsuit up over her legs. It was her own hermetic seal against the infectants of Expatria; the heterocytes swarming in her blood should be able to code for most pathogens, focusing her nanomedically boosted immune system on the most vulnerable genetic flaws of her infectants; but to begin with, caution must always be the way. It was sensible, it was Roman.

She smoothed the suit over her abdomen, making the fit perfect. She might be wearing it for quite some time before it was decided that their bodies could take the exposure.

The hood came up over her head and she was glad she didn't have her hair long like Petra or Sugratski. With the breather and mask in place she passed through the sonic shield that sealed the hermetic bubble's doorway, driving alien particles away by its silent, hypersonic wail.

She still hated being alone in Station Yellow. With her mask skewed towards infrared, she searched the passageway in both directions before fully emerging. There were so many hiding places.

She guided herself out, towards the docking area. The locals didn't usually bother an active—they seemed wary of the suits and masks; the evangelicals had abandoned this kind of protection within hours, despite their virtually nonexistent nanomedical protection. Their confidence had been justified this far: to date, the MetaPlex had identified and analysed fourteen Expatrian pathogens, all mutant forms of traditional viruses and bacteria, all easily provided with an antidote.

Katya made her templars check the seal-points of her suit. She was Roman, she had to be cautious. It was genetic. She came to an open area and smiled as a small boy bulleted past her, staring at her in awe, the way menials look at an avatar. 'Law is righteous,' she called after him, helping the work of the evangelicals.

She turned back to face her direction of travel, nudged through a small opening that would take her to the docking bay, passed smoothly along a lichen-encrusted tunnel. She had to be at the shuttle in fourteen minutes; she had time in hand. As she went, she hummed the company hymn.

It wasn't long before she realised that she had taken a wrong turning. She knew the route back to the bay like she knew her own body but she had never come to this hatchway before. The child must have distracted her, she decided. The Roman in her made her want to retrace her path until she found her way again.

But Director Roux himself had told her that she was not a typical Roman. She flipped the release and swung the hatch open. Beyond, there was a wider passageway. She thought she recognised it, passed through, turned in the direction her templar told her was most likely to prove correct.

The passage was unfamiliar, now that she was in it, floating along it. She slowed her heart, lowered her blood pressure. She wasn't lost. A Roman active does not lose her way.

Just as she began to doubt herself she heard sounds of people, the familiar accents of Earth, not the chattery singsong of orbit. She bounced around a bend in the passageway and came to a halt as the noises suddenly cut off.

She had come to a cul-de-sac and it was occupied by fifteen to twenty people, most of them evangelicals, along with a few orbitals. The talking, the laughter, slowly started up again. There was some sexual activity in one corner, orbital and evangelical. Others were drifting, laughing, drinking what looked like alcohol from long, clear tubes.

One of the evangelicals was approaching her, the bearded preacher, the one called RoValentin. There was a strange fluidity to his motion. Katya thought he had been drinking, then, as he tumbled to a halt before her—too close, she hated this kind of proximity to anyone, but especially an evangelical—she spotted a pair of fibres hanging down the back of his neck, a sliver of plastic gelled to the base of his skull.

RoValentin was Free-wIring, FIring as they used to call it on the street. Surely everyone knew how dangerous that was, for the sake of Max? Surely...

She remembered compassion, a virtue available to one of her rank. RoValentin was only an evangelical, he did not have the templar implants of an active, he did not have the genetic balance of an active. He didn't have the control. The Free wIre was a means of inducing across the skull some of what an active already had, it was a way of illicitly stimulating the implanted Glory Chip, a way to mimic the action of the Max. 'Control of the body is control of the mind,' she muttered, ignoring his glazed stare.

She would report this, but she would plead compassion on their behalf.

'Katya Tatin,' he said, struggling to form the words, forgetting all formality before his senior. 'Come on. Will ya' get outta those skins? Come on, let's have your mask.'

He lunged at her but she dodged him easily. She had the self-control and he did not. She was glad she had Maxed so thoroughly.

'Use of the Free wIre is against Corporate law,' she said, keeping herself between the evangelical and the passageway with perfect Roman caution.

RoValentin shook his head, drew back, trying to size her up.

'Law is righteous,' she said, controlling her anger at his lack of respect for the company.

'Come on,' he said. 'We could screw and you could try the wIre—how can you tell what's bad until you've tried it?' He drifted towards her again and she edged back.

'You are neglecting your duty towards the Holy Corporation,' said Katya. He needed therapy, she thought, something that would realign his sense of hierarchy. Evangelicals don't ask actives for sex, they don't ask them to FIre.

He spread his hands wide, rose into a psychologically dominating position, spread out and above Katya. 'Have you ever lived?' he said. 'Have you? Have you ever felt someone against you, someone you hate but who you want nonetheless? Have you ever had to kill someone so you could have a chance to survive yourself? Have you ever felt so high you can't ever come down? So low you can't even breathe?

'You're hollow. All you fucking actives. Hollow as the sun-tube on three tee. You mouth the scriptures but you don't feel it right in here—' he thumped his chest and began to drift chaotically '—you never feel a fucking thing.'

Katya was backing along the tunnel, trying to keep distance between herself and the advancing, ranting evangelical. She remembered the snipe on her thigh and that thought made her feel a little less vulnerable.

'You and your type aren't anything to the Holy Cee.
Me?
It's people like me that have to cover for you, patch up all the loose shit that you leave behind you. I was in Prague after you were, Katya Tatin. I was left to sort out all that shit.'

She had heard about Prague, after she had left. Yet another eruption of violence before the evangelicals had tied things back together. There had been corruption, street-fighting, murder; GenGen had done what it could to limit the devastation. She hadn't known that RoValentin had been there. 'It must have been hard for you,' she said.

'It needed doing,' said RoValentin. 'The culture of belief...' He stopped following her and tugged at his trailing wires, pulled the plastic strip free from his skull. 'We've all got weakness,' he said. 'You're not any better than the rest of us.'

Katya checked her time signal. She had six minutes to go.

'First two lefts,' said RoValentin. 'Then just keep going. Three minutes if you're fit.'

She backed away and wondered how he had known. Following his directions she arrived at the shuttle with two hundred seconds to spare.

~

The team was smaller this time; the landing shuttle had less passenger space than the interorbital ferries and they had to take more supplies and equipment. If things went smoothly they would be supported within three hours. If not they might be alone on Expatria for a number of days.

Back in the passenger gallery were forty-five evangelicals, a reliable mix of Romans and Ephesians and Corinthians. The actives, in the lounge with Katya, were all Roman, once again. The all-rounders, the adapters. There were eight of them in total; they would be led again by a trif-projection of Director Roux on one of his autonomes.

Petra Odenz was their physical leader. Despite her performances in sim she had managed to retain favour with the MetaPlex. Before they had arrived in orbit Katya had sometimes resented Petra's rank but she had accepted it, like a good Roman. Now, she did not mind at all. There was more to occupy her mind than career progression.

Katya had her own special tasks, in any case. She remembered the director's words: 'Know thine enemy, Katya; know thy partner, too.' She was still under that instruction: during the early minutes of this trip the MetaPlex had updated her with what information it had about the important figures on Expatria.

She looked at Petra, on the far side of the lounge. She was strapped into her webbing already, prepared for the landing. Her face looked set, maybe a little scared. She had the pale skin, the thick lips, the careful speech patterns—her pheno was all Roman, anybody would read her that way. She looked across the room and nodded at Katya.

Katya smiled, turned away. Closed her eyes. Slotted down into plusRem. Time to clear the screens.

'Twenty-seven, twenty-six, twenty-five...'

The shuttle's voice was a slight moderation of that of Maxwell Riesling's psylogue. A bit more tenor, a bit less of the old-states accent. The sound felt right in Katya's ears.

The shuttle had paused on twenty-five and the downward motion had halted in synch. The onboards were searching the landing site for the best terrain. A count of twenty-five meant they were about 500 metres up, Katya decided, after a quick calculation.

She dropped her blood pressure by thirty over ten and mumbled a series of prayers to the All as she waited for the count to resume.

... twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty...

This was where the sims usually cut in and Katya felt a sudden surge of
déjà vu
. She looked around at the rest of the team, at Petra, at Leo, at Sugratski, Mika, Leo, Sherpa and Cora. She wondered what Turkut would be doing, back on Station Yellow. Would he have time to watch the coverage live, or would he have to catch up later? For some reason she wished she knew for sure.

The count paused at four and the shuttle hung in the air for three seconds. Then they dropped, steadily, to the ground. There was a whine as the fine air-jets cut in for the last metres of drop, a sound that should have been shielded by its own sonic envelope, but also a sound that passed through the plastic walls of the shuttle with relentless ease.

The shuttle stopped dropping. It was on the ground. The sensation of
stopping
was exactly as it was in the sims; it made Katya's skin tingle with anticipation, a feeling she cut with that familiar prompt to the templars.

'Control of the body is control of the mind.' The Maxim helped, as it always did when she had landed on Expatria. Her control was near to its potential.

Gravity felt strange after her time in Station Yellow. It made her limbs feel like they were doing what they had always known they should, fighting the ancient battle, resisting the irrepressible attraction of mass to mass.

The shuttle released her webbing and she stood and stretched.

The hatchway was set in the short passage between lounge and evangelical gallery. The actives filed in behind Petra and stood by the exit.

'Are your masks in place?' said Petra. Her manner had never been like this in sim. This time it mattered. 'OK,' she continued, speaking into her carpal. 'Open up.'

The door slowly rose.

First there was a crack and Katya could see drying mud, pieces of broken woodwork and masonry. She wondered what they had landed on and then forgot as the crack widened, the door rising, showing stone slabs and wooden crosses and little marble blocks, almost like miniature buildings.

No more than fifty metres distant, Katya saw her first Expatrians.

They looked like ordinary people, although their phenotypical range was far more extreme—their weight-height ratios were way out of line with their optima.

Some of them wore orange and yellow robes and their heads were shaven, their skin marred by etchings of blue and green and red, masking pheno with an artificial coloration; some type of tattoo, thought Katya, not the skin disease it had originally brought to mind. Some of them carried swords and burning torches.

Others wore paler robes and had hair on their heads and faces. Yet others wore more sombre clothing. They all stood, mesmerised by the shuttle and the actives standing in its doorway. One of the bald ones was running the blade of his sword across his tongue in what Katya decided was some kind of nervous tic. She wondered how he didn't cut himself.

In the distance there was another crowd, less organised than the first. There were people in greys and whites, some of them chasing excitedly after others, most of them standing as transfixed as the first crowd.