Fractions (40 page)

The enemy was described by her unit's political officer: ‘It's not so much the Hanoverian remnants we have to worry about. It's all the Free State rabble that flourished under their protection. The eco-terrorists, the cultist mini-states, the backyard separatists and sandpit socialists who betrayed the Republic the first time. The fake left who preferred having their own petty kingdoms to fighting their corner in a democracy. They all went along with the Restoration Settlement and only made noises when our people were surviving like hunted beasts. Now they're coming out of their holes to have a go at carving a bigger chunk for themselves. They think the Republic is weaker than the Kingdom. Our job is to make them think again. They can have any way of life they want, run their communities as they see fit, but they can't keep other folk out with guns or use guns to expand their territories. They can even keep their guns, but it's going to be our guns on the street.'

All the species of cranks and creeps, she thought. This was her war.

On high moorlands and city streets, in gutted refineries and abandoned service areas, she fought through the hot autumn and bitter winter. Days of storm alternated with calm, chill silences when the smoke of burning villages rose straight into a pale blue sky. She crawled through mud and water, bracken and barbed wire.

She learned about what was going on out in the world in snatches from television and radio. With Dissembler out of action, all the programs that ran on it, most importantly DoorWays
^™
, were useless. The effect on communications was convulsive, and not altogether unwelcome: it was primarily administrative and military machines that were crippled. Turks and Russians fought inconclusively on the Bulgarian front; the Sheenisov (the name had caught on, become anglicized) reached Ulan Bator; a gang of asteroid miners declared themselves the Republic of New South Yorkshire. The
US
Government responded to the strikes and riots by pulling out of the
UN
and calling a Constitutional Convention. Several of the States seceded in advance, prompting commentators to remark that the
US
was rapidly becoming the world's second Former Union: the
FU
2. The
UN
battlesats, starved by a rock-solid space-workers' boycott, threatened selected targets with laser weapons. One of the lunar magnapult combines gave them a short lesson in orbital mechanics, and the threat passed.

And that was the last of the United Nations. Without the
US
to underpin it, there could be no
US/UN
. Space Defense became Earth Defense, its weapons turned outwards to face threats from nature, not from man. The Yanks became Americans again, and enthusiastically set about investigating and purging and denouncing and testifying.

Janis saw Jordan's face one day, on a flickering television in an empty shop: some soundbite interview, over in seconds. She felt a pang of guilt, and that evening sat down and wrote a letter to him. He must know already that Moh was dead; the
ANR
was punctilious about these things. She knew, without ever having been told, that she should not tell anyone how Moh had died. It didn't leave much to say, but she felt better for having said it.

She made friends, and lost some.

The Republic made enemies faster than it destroyed them.

 

Goddess
, she thought,
this place stinks.

It was a village of a few score people, in a green dell in the Lake District. Its generators ran on methane – fart-fuel, her comrades called it – and on scavenged solar cells. The houses were tar-paper and corrugated iron and animal hide. The people lived by farming and hunting and stealing, and didn't wash.

Janis stood in the mud at the centre of the village, the rifle on her hip, turning and scanning. A few bodies sprawled among the houses. The thirteen surviving menfolk sat in the mud, their hands over their heads. Their rifles and crossbows and knives were stacked well out of their reach. About thirty
ANR
soldiers stood guard or went through the houses, throwing stuff out: clothes, weapons, food, furnishings. They had the look of people sifting through a nauseating heap of garbage. The women and children stood in the eaves of the unwalled shelter they called the long house. Rain dripped off it on to their matted hair, left runnels of white on their closed faces. If they took a step into the shelter or away from the run-off a snarl or a kick sent them back.

The air was filled with the whining of dogs muzzled with twisted wire, leashed by ropes held by a couple of
ANR
soldiers, and every so often by the scream of another dog as it was skewered on a long roughly sharpened spike driven at an angle into a low bank of ground. Six, so far. Five to go.

The rain rattled off a black body-bag in the back of a humvee at the entrance to the village, near the tree where they'd found the body: a captured soldier hanging by the ankles, and as the dogs had left it.

Three to go.

A small boy yelled out as that dog was spiked. He broke away from the grip of a woman's hand on his shoulder and dashed forward. The line was within a second of breaking after him. Janis swung the gun round. It checked her hand as if it had struck a solid obstacle, and fired a single shot. The boy screamed and fell down in the mud. Janis felt her heart stop. The boy picked himself up and ran over to the woman.

The last dog writhed on the spike. The first had not yet died.

‘Nobody found their tongue yet?' The unit's leader, a small, mild-mannered, middle-aged man called Wills, looked around like a schoolteacher.

Silence.

‘Whose idea was it?'

Silence, and falling rain.

Wills turned to Janis.

‘Get a couple of guys to make another spike,' he said, loud enough to be overhead. He looked over the line of bedraggled women and children as he spoke.

No
, said a voice in Janis's phones,
you can't do that! You can't even threaten that.

It was Moh's voice. She heard her own voice say to Wills, not loud enough for anyone else to hear: ‘No. You can't do that! You can't even threaten that.'

Wills's eyes narrowed behind his rain-spattered glades.

‘Are you threatening me, citizen?'

‘No, I'm—' She realized the gun had turned with her body, and was pointing straight at Wills. By now, not doing that sort of thing had become a reflex to her. She lowered the muzzle. ‘Sorry, Wills,' she said. ‘You know we can't do – what you suggested. Even to
say
it takes us near—' She moved an open, stiff hand up and down: an edge.

‘We've got to do something,' Wills said. ‘If we don't—'

‘Do what we're supposed to do,' Janis snapped. ‘Call in a chopper, vac the barbarians out and trash the place.'

‘Not enough, comrade, not for the comrades.' Wills tipped his head back very slightly. Janis knew he was right. The lads and lasses wanted revenge. If they didn't get it, a provoked incident and an itchy trigger might give them a slaughter to remember.

‘OK,' she said. ‘We trash the place first, let the barb watch it, then vac them.'

Wills looked at her for a moment, then nodded and smiled as if they'd been having a friendly discussion, and gave the order. The citizen-soldiers whooped, the barbarians wept as the houses went up in flames around them. More steam than smoke rose to meet the evacuation chopper. Another batch of bawling orphans and sullen
new citizens
sent to six months in the resettlement camps, and then a life in the shanty-towns. It happened to every village that didn't join up with the Republic's militia.

They called it the shake and vac.

 

That night they made camp in a village of proper houses, built of stone, whose street was bypassed by the main road. It was the sort of place that had always been part of the Kingdom, and had rallied, however reluctantly, to the Republic as a protection against the barb. The unit had no intention of alienating the inhabitants by billeting in their houses, and settled in an old building that had once been a local primary school. It had a good high wall around it, and a kitchen and canteen that could be used – even, to their delight, showers that worked.

Wills brought his tray of dinner to the table where Janis sat with three other soldiers. Most of the light in the canteen was the glow from the kitchen at the far end of it. They all had their glades on. The false colours of the food were unappetizing, but the smell overrode that. They ate quickly, from habit.

After a while Wills said, ‘You were right, you know, Taine.'

She looked up, wiping her plate with bread. ‘I know.'

Political discussion was free in this army. Janis hadn't felt the need to take part in any until now. She was still reluctant, unwilling to take her mind away from the memory of that shocking, familiar voice. But it was not to be avoided – it was part of what the memory meant.

‘Why do we have to do it?' she said. ‘Don't think I'm soft. I got good reason to despise these people. But why can't we just leave the barb alone if they leave us alone? Why do we have to force them to take sides when most of them will choose the other side?'

‘It's civil war,' Wills said. ‘There's no neutrality. They think the same way. What harm had that poor bastard done to them?'

Janis pushed her plate away. There was still some meat on it. She lit a cigarette. Nearly all the comrades smoked. She'd accepted one cigarette, once, in a tense moment, and then another…Moh had been right about life-expectancy.

‘Maybe,' she said, ‘maybe he tried to make them take sides, and they saw that as harm.'

The others at the table shifted. She could hear the quiet rattle and clink of gear. Somebody snorted.

‘You're something of a new citizen yourself, aren't you, Taine?' Wills said in a low voice.

The gun was solid and heavy between her feet. Silence rippled outwards across the room.

She looked at Wills, and saw someone standing behind him. Another cadre, she thought, come swiftly to calm the situation. She glanced away from Wills to see who it was.

Moh's mocking eyes looked back at her, his slyly smiling lips mouthed the single word ‘Remember', and then no one was there. She felt the tiny hairs on her face and neck prickle, vestigial response to a glacial chill.

Remember.

‘
Civis Britannicus sum
,' she said. She spread her hands, keeping them in plain sight, relaxed except for the fingers that held her cigarette: she saw the small smoke-rings rise from their trembling. ‘You're right, Wills, I don't know what it was like all these years. I didn't feel the Betrayal like some of you.' She leaned back and drew again on her cigarette. ‘I remember a man who did.' She smiled as she said it, shaking inside.

Wills nodded. ‘All right, Taine. Uncalled-for.' She knew that for him this counted as a deep apology. He looked at her as if he knew what she was talking about. ‘All been there, what?' He looked around the table. ‘
Gens una sumus.
'

Later somebody found a dusty guitar in a cupboard and carried it high into the canteen, and they sang songs from the war and the revolution, songs of their own Republic and of others, “Bandiera Rossa” and “Alba” and “The Men Behind the Wire” and “The Patriot Game”.

Janis sang along, holding the rifle across her lap like the man held the guitar. She looked at all the faces in the dim light, as if looking for another face, and thought she saw it.

That night she lay awake until fatigue overcame her rage and grief.

 

Several times over the next days she saw him again, and heard him: a yell of warning, a mutter of advice, a pattern of light and shadow under trees.

Sometimes clear, solid-looking, out in the open.

She did not believe this was happening. Not to her. She told herself, again and again, that it was the strain of the fighting. It was not her sanity that was strained, not her philosophy that was flawed. Only her perceptions were at fault, her eyes too accustomed to seeking out hidden shapes.

A day came when she saw him out of the corner of her eye, striding along beside her.

‘Go away,' she said.

He went away. At the next resting-place she sat a few metres from the others and took the glades off to wipe her eyes. When she put them back on he was standing in front of her, looking down at her with concern.

‘Janis, let me talk to you.'

‘Oh, Moh!' It was not fair to come back like that.

‘I'm not Moh,' he said sadly.

‘Then who the hell are you?'

He smiled and got down beside her and lay on his side, facing her. She reached out and her hand went through him. She beat the grass and wept, and took the glades off. He was no longer there, but when she replaced them again he returned.

‘Aha,' she said.

‘Don't let anyone see you talking to yourself,' he said. ‘I'll hear you just as well if you subvocalize.'

She turned and lay face-down on the grass, murmuring, sometimes glancing sideways to reassure herself that he was still with her. Her heart hammered with a wild hope.

‘You're in the gun, aren't you? Did you – did you upload into it?'

‘I'm in the gun,' he said. ‘But I'm not Moh. I'm the
AI
in the gun. I…found myself…in the gun just after Moh died. I have memories of Moh, I have routines to imitate him perfectly – his voice, his appearance.' He chuckled wickedly. ‘And in other ways, with the right equipment. The gun had a huge amount of stored information about Moh, and I can use it to project a – a persona. But don't kid yourself, Janis, I'm not even his ghost.'

‘You're his fetch.'

‘You could say that.'

She chewed a blade of grass and thought about how Moh had talked to the gun, how he had talked about the gun. The gun had sometimes acted independently, unpredictably. A mind of its own, awakening in the bolted-on hardware and pirated software, in conversation with a man, interacting with…

‘The Watchmaker!' she said. ‘That's where you got the awareness from.' And in that case, indirectly, from Moh.

Moh's image frowned. ‘I don't think so.'

‘Perhaps it came from Moh himself.' And in
that
case…

‘Oh, Janis, I know why you're doing this, but please, don't. Moh is dead.'

‘And you're alive.'

‘So it would seem.'

‘Son of a gun.' She looked at him and smiled. ‘And you know more about him than I do. So maybe more of him has survived than he ever expected. “Death is not lived through.”'

The fetch was silent for a moment. ‘I should know.'

Her comrades were getting ready to move off again.

‘What are we going to do now?' Janis whispered.

‘Next place you can find a comms port,' the fetch said, ‘jack me in.'